The Congressional Record is a unique source of public documentation. It started in 1873, documenting nearly all the major and minor policies being discussed and debated.
“REBUILD AMERICA JOBS ACT--MOTION TO PROCEED” mentioning the U.S. Dept of Agriculture was published in the Senate section on pages S7021-S7058 on Nov. 2, 2011.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
REBUILD AMERICA JOBS ACT--MOTION TO PROCEED
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. Under the previous order, the Senate will resume consideration of the motion to proceed to S. 1769, which the clerk will report.
The bill clerk read as follows:
Motion to proceed to the consideration of the bill (S. 1769) to put workers back on the job while rebuilding and modernizing America.
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Senator from Michigan.
Mr. LEVIN. Madam President, the Rebuild America Jobs Act addresses two of our most fundamental responsibilities: first, the need to respond to the urgent jobs crisis and, second, the duty to create the physical framework for economic growth now and into the future.
There should be no debate about our duty to fulfill those two responsibilities. Yet, once again, we are in a situation where the refusal of our Republican colleagues to compromise, even on consideration of measures they have supported in the past, prevents us from acting on behalf of the American people.
I am encouraged by reports that perhaps finally the need to act has convinced some of our colleagues across the aisle to at least consider allowing the Senate to debate this legislation. I hope for the sake of millions of people in Michigan and in every other State who are waiting for us to act that at least some of our Republican colleagues will relent and allow us to at least debate this measure.
What would this bill accomplish? Simply put, it seeks to create jobs now and into the future. It does so by funding a wide array of infrastructure projects, including roads, bridges, rail transport, mass transit, airport facilities, and updated air traffic control systems. These projects would put construction workers on the job immediately. They would, according to estimates by Moody's, boost economic growth by more than a dollar and a half for every dollar we spend. And the benefits would continue into the future as American companies and American workers benefit from the increased competitiveness that modernized infrastructure provides.
In my home State of Michigan, this legislation would result in more than $900 million going to infrastructure projects. It would create about 12,000 jobs. Residents of my State are keenly aware of the need to act, and to act now, on the jobs crisis, and they are keenly aware of the terrible costs we pay if we allow our economic competitors to establish advantages over our workers. In my State, nearly one-third of our bridges are structurally deficient or functionally obsolete. More than one-third of our major roads are in poor or mediocre condition. About 40 percent of our major urban roadways are congested. The people of Michigan want us to act on jobs, and they want us to act now to maintain America's competitive edge.
These are not controversial ideas--at least they have not been in the past. Support for infrastructure is traditionally bipartisan. It was a Republican President--Dwight Eisenhower--who launched the Interstate Highway System. This bill includes an infrastructure bank based on a bipartisan idea once supported by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Every Member of this body, Democrat and Republican, fights for adequate infrastructure spending for their State. Why, when faced with the dual challenges of a jobs crisis and increasingly outdated infrastructure, would we hamper our ability to grow now and in the future by not allowing a debate on this bill and adopting this bill?
Perhaps some of my Republican colleagues object to the way this bill is paid for. As has been the case with previous jobs bills, this legislation would not add a dollar to the deficit. It would pay for these much needed infrastructure efforts by asking those with incomes of more than $1 million a year to pay a fraction of a percentage point of their income above $1 million a year in additional taxes. Again, outside the Halls of Congress, this is not a controversial notion. A strong majority of Americans, including a majority of rank-and-file Republicans, support the idea of asking the wealthiest among us to contribute to solving our jobs crisis.
I might say, in terms of investing in infrastructure, a recent CNN poll shows that 72 percent of Americans support investing in infrastructure to create jobs. We know from this poll that a huge majority of Americans want us to invest in infrastructure. They want us to invest in infrastructure now to create jobs. That is mirrored by other polls which show a vast majority of Americans believe the fair way to pay for this investment is for the wealthiest among us to pay a small fraction of the income they make above a level such as $1 million, which is what is provided for in this bill. Now, make no mistake, if Republicans reject this legislation because of the funding mechanism, they are voting directly in opposition to the will of the American people and against the concepts of basic fairness that should guide our actions.
Finally, relative to this pay-for, there is only one group of Americans who have done well financially in the last few decades; that is, the wealthiest 1 percent. The rest of Americans, middle-income Americans, have either lost ground or gotten nowhere, but the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans have done exceedingly well, and their proportion of the national income has grown dramatically. So to say income above $1 million should not pay a small fraction of a percent in a surcharge to help pay for what this country desperately needs and would create jobs flies right against the feelings and beliefs of the vast majority of the American people.
Finally, the vote we are going to take in the next couple days is not even a vote on the bill. This is a vote on ending a Republican filibuster on the motion to proceed to the bill. It is a motion which would allow us to begin to debate a bill.
I have been continually surprised at the lockstep opposition of Republicans to even beginning to debate on these matters. I would make a simple request, and a number of us have done the same. Let's debate this legislation. Allow us to debate the legislation. If the legislation can be improved, offer ideas to improve it. If there is a better idea, offer the better idea. I believe Republicans would have a very receptive audience if they propose ideas for which there is strong evidence of benefits and economic growth and job creation. But until we can get a job-creation measure to the floor of the Senate, we cannot even discuss those issues in a legislative setting; we can only really hear debate as to whether we ought to be allowed to debate those issues.
A bipartisan vote to begin the debate on jobs legislation would send an important signal to the people we all represent, a signal that we are ready to put aside partisanship and address the problems our people face. I hope Republicans will end their filibuster so we can adopt the motion to proceed to this jobs bill.
Madam President, I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The clerk will call the roll.
The bill clerk proceeded to call the roll.
Mr. MERKLEY. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. Without objection, it is so ordered.
Mr. MERKLEY. Madam President, I rise to address our Nation's job crisis and to share some thoughts about why it is important that we proceed to debate on the Rebuild America Jobs Act. It may come as a surprise to some across the Nation that at this point this Chamber is not debating the Rebuild America Jobs Act but that we are debating whether to debate. Only in the Senate could we be engaged in that type of question, when across America millions of folks want to see us act, want to see us create jobs.
It was only a few weeks ago we had a similar debate. That debate was over the America Jobs Act, a broad portfolio of measures to put our economy back on track and create jobs for Americans. To get closure on whether to debate, we had to get a supermajority under the rules of the Senate.
My colleagues across the aisle opposed that and we could not get to the debate of the bill on how to create jobs. Now we have before us a smaller segment of that bill, one that focuses on the construction industry. Again, we find ourselves debating whether to debate rather than getting down to work and creating jobs. So I hope this time the outcome will be quite different.
The jobs crisis has hit hard across this Nation. It hit especially hard in my home State of Oregon, where the job rate has been lowered as the unemployment rate has been higher than in most States across this Nation. One of the main reasons Oregon is hurting is because our construction industry, our residential and commercial construction industry, is flat on its back. More than 40,000 construction jobs have been lost in Oregon since 2007. Thousands more have been lost in related industries such as forest products and nursery stock and grass seed, all of which only thrive when we are building homes in America. Right now, we are not building homes in America.
So we need a boost to get the construction industry moving again. If you do not believe me, just listen to the people in the State of Oregon. A few weeks ago, I asked my constituents to write in and share their stories. Today, I am going to share some of those stories with all of you. Carolann from Marion County writes in and says:
I am a construction cost accountant with 47 years of experience and two masters degrees. I have been widowed since 1996. I am 69 years old. I fully support my 67-year-old sister who has dementia and is in remission from colon cancer. Wall Street and my own bout with cancer just before I turned 65 has wiped out a lifetime of savings, my retirement nest egg. I have to work or we will be homeless in about 3 months. I drive a 16-year-old vehicle that is on its last legs. I have aging parents who are struggling to keep their farm. Those are the facts. In late 2008, for the first time in my career, I was laid off from my construction accounting job. Since that time I have been unable to find another job in any field despite my good references. Currently I work part time for a start-up dot-com. My prognosis for continued employment is shaky. Banks will not loan money to a start-up. This summer I went from June 26 to September 7 without a paycheck of any kind. Last week I applied for a job at Wall Mart for Oregon's minimum wage. I will probably get hired, but I am not kidding myself about job security. That does not exist any more for most of us. Senator, the worst thing about all of this is our do-nothing Congress. Washington, D.C. has lost touch with America.
Her words ring powerfully in this Chamber. She, similar to millions of other Americans, is saying this economy is tough. Family circumstances are rough. Why does Congress not get down to work and debate and pass job-creating legislation? She is frustrated with this do-nothing Congress and we are debating whether to debate a jobs bill. I encourage my colleagues to listen to Carolann from Marion County. Let's get past this point and get down to debating the jobs bill.
Hank from Marion County writes:
Three years ago, I was at the top of my more than 35 years in construction management working as a senior project manager on a large project. As the economy tanked, the projects were terminated. Today I am unemployable after hundreds of applications. I am left able, willing and highly experienced, yet undesired. Our farm was foreclosed and my wife and I had to file bankruptcy. Currently our mortgage lender refuses to complete a home loan modification, although they qualified us 2 years ago for the program. And since then we have been making the required payments each month even without a final agreement. We have met with community groups, written letters, made calls, yet nothing seems to happen. In another year when the bankruptcy period ends, we fear the bank will simply foreclosure again and we will lose our farm.
Again, another voice from a family deeply affected by the collapse of the construction industry and a call to us to help put it back on its feet.
Brian from Yamhill County writes:
I have worked in the lumber industry for 35 years. In 2009 I was laid off for 11 months. I did go back to work in June only to be cut again after only 5 days of work. I went back to work in December for the same company. In September 2010 there was a cutback. More than 70 people lost their jobs. I was lucky. I made the cut. But my pay was reduced by nearly
$5 an hour. I went from driving a fork lift to a clean-up position. 6 months went by and then another cut. This time another 60 people lost their jobs. I was lucky again. And I worked at a new position for nearly a year until September 2011, and then came another cut. This time I was one of 42 people to be laid off with no chance of a call back. Now there are rumors that the entire plant is closing. I have been out of work for 1 month now. And in my job search I have been running into the same thing everywhere I go: No work available.
Every industrial area I go into I see many buildings where companies have gone out of business. Windows and doors are boarded up. I want Congress to do the job they are being paid to do so I can go back to work.
That is the line he closes on: that we here in this Chamber should do the job we are assigned; that is, to take on, amend, and pass job-
creating legislation so he can find a job, so he can go back to work. I think his sentiment is echoed by millions of American families. There is no substitute for a job. No program can come anywhere close to the important role a job plays in the personal satisfaction, the structure it gives us in our life, in the knowledge we are putting a roof over our family's head and putting food on the table. No program can suffice. A job is the heart of the success of our families. Yet here we are fiddling while Rome burns or, in this case, filibustering while millions of Americans go without jobs. It is not right.
I say to my colleagues, particularly I wish to encourage my colleagues across the aisle who filibustered the last effort to put the jobs bill on the floor: Stop. Talk to the folks in your home State who are unemployed, who expect us to do what every American worker expects us to do, which is to debate and pass job-creating legislation.
The bill which we are debating whether to debate, the Rebuild America Jobs Act, is a commonsense strategy to put people back to work in an industry that needs it, making investments our country will have to make sooner or later anyway. One in four bridges in America is rated deficient. We get a D grade on our infrastructure from the American Society of Civil Engineers.
This is not the America we know. It is not the America we want. Let's build the America of the future that will have the infrastructure to drive our economy positively. Infrastructure is not an option; it is a necessity. We can build it now when interest rates are low and jobs are needed or we can spend more later when our infrastructure has deteriorated further and it is more expensive. We can do it earlier, with lower interest rates and more bang for the buck, or we can do it later, when it will be more expensive, more difficult, with a higher interest pricetag. It doesn't seem to be a difficult choice. It certainly doesn't seem to be a difficult choice as to whether we should at least be on the bill, debating it.
I know many folks are coming to the Chamber to address the question of how we get a jobs bill actually before the Senate. I hope all of my colleagues will get on the line with folks back home, go to that town meeting, and say: Do you want us to debate a bill or do you want me to keep stalling and preventing a debate on how to create jobs? I am pretty confident 9 out of 10 people--and maybe 10 out of 10 people--
will stand up and say: Quit stalling. Let's get to work here so America can get back to work.
Madam President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The clerk will call the roll.
The bill clerk proceeded to call the roll.
Mr. SCHUMER. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. Without objection, it is so ordered.
Mr. SCHUMER. Madam President, today I want to discuss the jobs bill we are currently debating and how important it is that we pass this right away.
I also want to respond to the minority leader's remarks this morning in which he tried to deny the bipartisan nature of this proposal and, instead, sought to divert this Chamber toward a hodgepodge of bills taken up by the House.
All across the country, and in our State of New York, from Poughkeepsie to Buffalo, there are roads, bridges, and sewer systems in need of serious repair. In each of these places, there are thousands of middle-class families desperately looking for work.
In the construction trades--the backbone of the middle class in many of our communities, in New York and around the country--there is 25, 30, 40 percent unemployment. That is true for many of my colleagues on both sides of the aisle. We all know that in previous recessions, 60 percent of the new jobs were in construction. That is because they lower interest rates and build more housing. There is no more lower interest rates because, when the recession began, they were already very low and, of course, there is a surplus of housing now in America.
This week, by voting to pass the Rebuild America Jobs Act, the Senate can get thousands of Americans off the unemployment line and back into the workforce. Because they get paid good salaries, the money they get flows into the economy and creates a multiplier effect that creates other jobs. These are good, solid, high-skilled American jobs--jobs we need.
Investing in our roads, bridges, and sewer systems could not be more urgent. More than one in four of our Nation's bridges is either structurally deficient or obsolete. I put out a list of those in New York State and it was astounding, in every part of our State.
We all know that, as we get closer to winter, our deteriorating roads will place a heavy burden on commuters and local taxpayers. Our local towns, villages, counties, and cities cannot afford the infrastructure work that is needed right now because of tight budgets and budget cutbacks at the Federal, State, and local levels. As this past weekend's storm made clear, investing in our crumbling sewer systems has never been more essential. All up and down the Northeast, old sewer systems have given way to serious flooding. We can make a downpayment on these priorities by passing this bill, and we should do so in a bipartisan manner.
When I travel across New York State, two of the first things people bring up to me are jobs and fixing our infrastructure. This bill does both. It doesn't matter whether the people are Democratic, Republican, Independent, from upstate or downstate, men or women, liberal or conservative, they all say the same thing, and we see this reflected in public opinion. A recent CNN poll showed nearly three-quarters of Americans support additional Federal investments in our infrastructure. Yes, they are worried about the deficit and our long-term fiscal health, but they know we can't cut our seed corn--infrastructure projects that create jobs and help America grow economically.
Here is the best part of this bill. It invests in projects that create jobs, but it is fully paid for by asking the wealthiest among us--those who have incomes of over $1 million--to pay a fraction more in taxes. They pay that not on their entire income but just on the part that is above $1 million. So if a millionaire--someone worth a lot of money--has an income of $1.1 million, they only pay the small .7-percent increase on the $100,000 that is over 1 million. Their first million doesn't change. The tax policy doesn't change.
Over the last decade, the middle class has taken a punch in the gut. The cost of sending kids to college has gone way up, the job market is tougher and tougher, and middle-class incomes are declining while costs to the middle class are rising. As a middle-class family sits around the dinner table Friday night trying to figure out how to pay all those bills and provide a great life for their future and for their children, it is very hard for them. However, the very wealthy--the very wealthy--
have done very well over the last decade.
A lot of those wealthy people live in our State of New York. We say: God bless them. They started successful businesses and have done well over the last decade. So to pay for this bill, we are just asking them to pay a sliver more--.7 percent more of each $1 they earn over $1 million. This is a situation where they can't say: We are afraid the money will be wasted, because it goes to infrastructure--directly to infrastructure. The way this is set up, there is no politics in the process. It is the most needed projects that get the work.
Let me cite a fact. I know many of my colleagues joined with me and Senators Brown of Ohio, Stabenow, and Casey in saying China has to play fair, and we are all worried China will get ahead of us economically. But right now China is spending four times as much on infrastructure as the United States--four times as much. That is not four times as much per capita, that is four times as much period.
Here is the real kicker: According to a recent survey of 1,400 business leaders in 142 countries, the United States ranks No. 24 in overall infrastructure quality. Is that a shame? We are behind countries such as Barbados and Oman. We also rank No. 20 in roads behind the United Arab Emirates, Portugal, and Namibia; No. 22 in ports behind Malaysia, Bahrain, and Panama; and No. 31 in air transportation infrastructure behind Chile, Thailand, Malaysia, and Malta.
How can it be that these great United States that we dearly love, and which always was at the top in creating roads and bridges and tunnels and great water systems--the third water tunnel in New York is being built right now, and it is an engineering wonder, though the planning for it started in the 1950s, I believe--is now ranked No. 31 in transportation, 22 in ports, 20 in roads behind countries such as the United Arab Emirates, Portugal, Malaysia, Thailand, and Chile? If that isn't a wake-up call, I don't know what is. We can't afford to let our global competitors get the edge.
So this bill builds back infrastructure, creates good-paying jobs that will send a shot into the arm of an economy that desperately needs it, and pays for it only by taxing the income over $1 million of those who are very wealthy and have done very well in our society.
How can anyone vote against something such as this? One could think maybe the only reason is because some people don't want the economy to grow and prosper. I hate to think that, but infrastructure has always been a bipartisan issue in this body, and it should continue to be.
Let me respond directly to the minority leader's comments this morning. He derided the proposal on the floor as something that had already been tried, something that had no chance of passing, and something that was not bipartisan.
First, already been tried? Oh, yes. Is the minority leader saying because we built the Erie Canal or built the highway system in the 1950s we shouldn't do any more infrastructure? That makes no sense. That just makes no sense. Every study shows the infrastructure part of the stimulus bill created lots of jobs and left us with better infrastructure.
The minority leader then said, as I mentioned, not just that it had been tried already but that it was not bipartisan. We know the need for infrastructure is a bipartisan priority. Just because the minority leader may be imposing a top-down strategy that bars anyone on his side from voting for any proposal offered by the President to improve the economy doesn't mean these proposals aren't bipartisan.
Just yesterday, the former Republican Senator from Ohio, a fiscal conservative if there ever was one--Senator Voinovich--was quoted as saying he believed the need to repair our roads and bridges was so great he thought President Obama should be raising the gas tax to fund those investments. I don't know if I agree with him on that specific solution, but isn't it remarkable, a Republican Senator calling for revenue increases to pay for infrastructure investment?
That is what we do in this bill. Let me say once again that Senator Voinovich is no longer in the Senate, so he is free to pretty much do as he wants. But I would hope other Senators who are in the Senate would join in that call because I believe they know in their heart it is the right thing to do.
The only difference between what we propose and what Senator Voinovich proposes is that instead of asking middle-class Americans to pay more at the pump, we ask those who have an income above $1 million to pay their fair share and to help put construction workers back on the job. That seems like the right set of priorities to me.
So the minority leader is clearly wrong when he says this concept isn't bipartisan.
Another former Senator--Chuck Hagel from Nebraska--has been a leader in calling for an infrastructure bank, which also is in this bill. Senator Hagel sponsored one of the first pieces of legislation creating an infrastructure bank and has continued to call for it since leaving the Senate.
So there are lots of Republicans out in the country who support this measure, and the polling shows a large number of Republicans who support the kind of proposal we have on the floor--building infrastructure and having those who make over $1 million pay for it so we don't increase the deficit. This is a bipartisan proposal.
So let's not hear from the minority leader or anybody else that the proposal on the floor isn't bipartisan. Just this morning, the top Republican on the Environment and Public Works Committee was quoted discussing the progress he and the chairwoman of that committee are making on a 2-year surface transportation bill. This is great news. I am glad to hear they are close to advancing that bill. But if one believes infrastructure is enough of a priority that they can support a long-term highway bill, why would they object to speeding up some of that investment now so we can put more Americans to work quickly?
This bill is bipartisan for sure. The minority leader has a political strategy to block all our President's initiatives to improve the economy. What does the minority leader call for instead? He has called for the Senate to take up a hodgepodge of bills sent over by House Republicans that, even when taken together, don't do enough to tackle the jobs problem.
Who would believe this hodgepodge of bills will do more for jobs than the traditional way we get out of recessions--infrastructure building? Most of the ideas cited by the minority leader have next to nothing to do with jobs at all. Many of these ideas belong more on a lobbyist's wish list rather than any serious jobs agenda.
It is a stretch to call many of these bipartisan. Many of these bills are items Republicans would be seeking to pass even if we were in a boom and had full employment. Many are just ideological priorities dressed up as job solutions.
It is laughable for the House leadership to act as though these proposals would address the jobs crisis when they are sitting on real solutions such as the China currency bill. The Speaker and the majority leader over in the House say they want to do something about jobs. They say they are worried about the two Houses not working together. We had a large bipartisan majority--65 votes--saying we are going to force China to play fair on currency because their failure to do so causes millions of jobs--good manufacturing jobs, primarily, though not exclusively--to leave this country. There is nothing more Congress could do that would lift our manufacturing sector than to confront China's unfair trade practices. But Speaker Boehner and Majority Leader Cantor sit on that bill and then tell us to take up this hodgepodge of items. The China currency bill passed with a bipartisan supermajority in the Senate. Yet the House leadership continues to sit on the sidelines as China takes advantage of us. The China currency bill is languishing in the House for no good reason.
I suggest Speaker Boehner heed the will of his Chamber and put that bill on the floor and that the minority leader in the Senate would be well served to stop pretending these pieces of the President's jobs bill are not bipartisan just because he is withholding his support in service to a strategy that, perhaps, outlines his No. 1 goal: the defeat of the President.
It is time to stop the games and accomplish something that can make a real dent in the jobs crisis. I say to my colleagues on both sides of the aisle: Pass this bill, rebuild our ailing and aging infrastructure, create jobs, and make sure what we do here does not increase the deficit by having those whose income exceeds $1 million pay a small, little increase to pay for it.
I yield the floor, and I suggest the absence of a quorum.
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The clerk will call the roll.
The bill clerk proceeded to call the roll.
Mr. MORAN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.
The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Franken). Without objection, it is so ordered.
USDA APHIS Memo
Mr. MORAN. Mr. President, yesterday we concluded our work here in the Senate on our version of the Agriculture appropriations bill. I am a member of the Appropriations Committee, a member of the agriculture appropriations subcommittee, and I supported the legislation we passed, but there is an outstanding issue at the Department of Agriculture of which I was only recently made aware. To me, it is a very serious issue, and given more time I would have taken action here on the Senate floor. It is an issue I will continue to pursue as a member of the conference committee as we work toward our final fiscal year 2012 Agriculture appropriations bill.
The issue involves a memo issued by the Department of Agriculture last month, October 6, authorizing the Department of Agriculture Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, APHIS, to conduct an animal welfare scientific forum. This forum was approved by Under Secretary Edward Avalos on October 12.
I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record the USDA's memo.
There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in the Record, as follows:
Decision Memorandum for the Under Secretary
Through: Gregory Parham, Administrator, Animal and Plant
Health Inspection Service.From: William H. Clay, Deputy Administrator, Wildlife
Services.Subject: APHIS Animal Welfare Scientific Forum.
ISSUE
How can APHIS effectively engage animal advocacy groups in ongoing scientific reviews and discussions of animal welfare issues related to APHIS program activities?
SUMMARY
At a meeting on July 26, 2011, between representatives from USDA's Marketing and Regulatory Programs (MRP) and the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS), HSUS representative John Hadidian requested that USDA establish an Animal Welfare Working Group to address animal welfare concerns regarding the use of existing and emerging lethal control technology.
The Under Secretary agreed with the general concept. APHIS recommends hosting a scientific forum facilitated by Animal Care (AC) at the APHIS Center for Animal Welfare in Kansas City, MO, to bring together animal advocacy groups as well as industry organizations to discuss the latest science regarding lethal control technology and other animal-welfare related activities carried out by the Agency. Wildlife Services (WS), AC and Veterinary Services (VS) activities in use now or those that may be used in the future would all be open for discussion at the forum. Pertinent scientific information gathered at the forum would be presented to the appropriate APHIS programmatic advisory committee for consideration.
Senior leaders from WS, AC and VS would meet with HSUS and several other advocacy groups in advance of the forum to identify priority topics for discussion and potential speakers.
Background
In the past several meetings with MRP and APHIS representatives, HSUS representatives have consistently raised concerns regarding horse slaughter, horse transport, and WS' use of lethal control methods, as well as several welfare issues related to enforcement of the Animal Welfare Act. At a meeting between Under Secretary Avalos and HSUS on July 26, 2011, HSUS representative John Hadidian requested that an animal welfare working group be established to address animal welfare concerns regarding the use of new and emerging lethal control technology. Under Secretary Avalos agreed with the general concept.
APHIS representatives believe that HSUS' intent is to position the organization to be recognized nationally as influencing APHIS policy on critical and sensitive welfare issues. Where and how emerging and existing lethal control technology can be used is one of many issues HSUS wishes to influence. By expanding the proposed group to other APHIS programs besides WS, and establishing a scientific forum, APHIS would be able to engage HSUS and other advocacy groups on a range of animal welfare issues and focus on science-based, practical application approaches, using best practices recognized and developed with input from a variety of stakeholders, including industry groups, animal advocacy groups, and State and Federal partners.
The National Wildlife Services' Advisory Council (NWSAC) is the recognized body to make recommendations to the Secretary regarding future WS activities. Topics of discussion from the forum that might aid or impact APHIS activities could be passed to the NWSAC or equivalent advising bodies for VS and AC, as appropriate.
HSUS and other welfare advocacy groups would be invited to participate in a preplanning meeting for the forum with senior leaders from WS, AC and VS. These groups would have input into the topics to be discussed, potential speakers for the topics, dates and times for the forum, how the forum should run, etc.
The APHIS Center for Animal Welfare in Kansas City, MO is experienced at managing dialogue between diverse groups on controversial and emotional issues and in facilitating group interaction so that individuals stay focused on established topics. Holding the forum at the Center would make it convenient for transparent interaction with all interested stakeholders from across the country.
OPTIONS
Option 1. Establish an Animal Welfare Scientific Forum consisting of representatives from APHIS, animal advocacy organizations, industry groups and other interested stakeholders. This would allow APHIS to engage animal advocacy organizations with concerns about WS' use of lethal control methods, as well as other APHIS issues, such as horse slaughter and transport This process would also refocus attention from prescriptive protocols based on subjective criteria to science-based approaches while still allowing for input from diverse groups, including end users.
Option 2. Do not establish a scientific forum and continue operating under existing protocols. HSUS and other advocacy groups currently meet with APHIS programs individually at random intervals to discuss issues of concern. Multiple meetings of these advocacy groups with the different APHIS Programs are less efficient than a single forum that covers multiple issues.
RECOMMENDATION
APHIS recommends Option 1. This will provide cross-program participation and will allow animal advocacy groups to participate in a non-prescriptive manner.
DECISION BY THE UNDER SECRETARY
Option 1: (Signed) Edward Avalos, October 12, 2011.
Mr. MORAN. What is ironic about this forum is there is little science involved. It is little more, in my view, than the Department of Agriculture spending taxpayer dollars on a forum to provide the Humane Society of the United States a public forum to espouse its anti-
agriculture views. The document speaks for itself in this regard. On page 2, the document states:
APHIS [the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service] representatives believe that the Humane Society's intent is to [promote and] position the organization to be recognized nationally as influencing APHIS policy on critical and sensitive welfare issues.
After reading that statement, it becomes clear that the Department of Agriculture is catering to an outside organization instead of relying on the advice of animal scientists at our land grant universities or even at the Department of Agriculture. If the Department of Agriculture was interested in science, why would it allow an animal rights organization to steer its agenda? Why wouldn't APHIS simply request the latest animal research from scientists across the country to make sure its guidance is up to date?
In addition to catering to HSUS, in planning this forum the Department of Agriculture APHIS is precluding input from members of the agricultural industry it is supposed to promote. The memo states:
HSUS and other welfare advocacy groups would be invited to participate in a preplanning meeting for the forum with senior leaders from Wildlife Services, Animal Care, and Veterinary Services. These groups would have input into the topics to be discussed, potential speakers for topics, dates and times for the forum, how the forum should run, etc.
That is quoting from the memo. No mention in the memo is made of asking any agricultural organization or animal scientists for preplanning assistance. According to the memo, HSUS is going to set the agenda for this forum. Even if the agricultural industry is later invited to the event, Agriculture would have the cards already stacked against them.
I believe it is important for most Americans to understand that HSUS is not your local animal shelter. HSUS is a national lobbying organization that spends most of its budget to lobby against farmers and ranchers who provide us with food or clothing that we enjoy. In fact, tax documents show that HSUS spends less than 1 percent of its budget on grants to animal shelters. Given these facts, you would have to wonder why the Department of Agriculture is giving this organization this platform and shunning producer organizations. This is one more demonstration that this organization is no real friend of rural America or the American farmer and rancher.
My purpose this morning is to inform my fellow Senators of this troubling development at USDA and to put the Secretary on notice that this type of conduct from the Department is unacceptable.
The Department's mission statement reads as follows:
We provide leadership on food, agriculture, natural resources, and related issues based upon sound public policy, the best available science, and efficient management.
USDA should live up to its mission statement and work to promote agriculture, not work against farmers' and ranchers' best interests and, I would say, not work against the best interests of the consumers of food in this country. Going forward, I will do my best to make sure the Department of Agriculture adheres to its mission statement.
Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
The legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Delaware.
Mr. CARPER. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
Updating the Postal Service
Mr. CARPER. Mr. President, just a few minutes ago, Senators Lieberman, Collins, Senator Scott Brown of Massachusetts, and I gathered in the press gallery upstairs to unveil a proposed compromise that is designed to help ensure we have a viable, strong U.S. Postal Service in this country for the next 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 years and longer.
There has been a lot of time spent in debate over jobs: How are we going to save jobs? How are we going to create jobs in this rough economy we are moving through? As it turns out, there are about 7 million jobs that flow from the Postal Service. There are only about 500,000 people who actually work for the Postal Service these days. There are roughly another 7 million who are associated with the Postal Service in one way or the other.
If we do nothing, the Postal Service--which lost $10 billion last year, is on track to lose a couple hundred billion dollars over the next 10 years--will literally go out of business next year--not in 10 years, not in 5 years but next year. That is a consequence none of us can look forward to and we need to provide predictability and certainty and part of that is to make sure we have a Postal Service that meets the needs of our businesses and the interests of our citizens.
The situation is dire, but it is not hopeless. This is one we can fix and the four of us believe this legislation will fix this problem not in 5 years, not in 10 years from now but literally provide the fix that is needed this year.
I mentioned in our press conference that a couple years ago my sister and I went to the home of my parents. My parents are now both deceased. We went to their home and we rooted through all kinds of nooks and crannies and boxes in the attic. We came across a treasure trove of letters they exchanged during World War II. They wrote to one another when my dad was overseas. They wrote several times a week. They saved the letters.
When I was in Southeast Asia back during the Vietnam War, the happiest day of the week for us was the day the mail came. The letters, the postcards, the birthday cards, the packages we received, magazines, the newspapers, made that the best day of the week.
When our Presiding Officer and I go on a CODEL to Afghanistan or to Iraq to visit our troops and see how they are doing and what we need to be doing, they still get the mail over there, but it is not like it was when I was serving or when my dad or my uncles were all serving. Troops today communicate with their families back home with Skype. They have the ability to use the cell phones. They have the Internet, Facebook, Twitter. You name it, it is a different game today. As the way we communicate in this country and in this world has changed, the Postal Service needs to change the way they do business and they are ready and anxious to do just that.
I think there is a good analogy in trying to figure out what the Postal Service needs to do to right size its enterprise. There is a good analogy we can draw from by looking back just 3 or 4 years ago at the situation the U.S. auto industry was in. Think about this: In 1970, my first trip to Southeast Asia, the market share of Ford, Chrysler, and GM was just about 85 percent. In 2009, their market share dropped to less than 50 percent.
When the auto industry reported to us and to the rest of the country in 2009 that given their market share, they had more employees than they needed, they had more auto plants than they needed, and there was a mismatch in terms of the wage-benefit structure they were paying their own employees versus the wage benefits that were being paid to their competition selling cars, trucks, and vans in this country, they asked us for a bailout--not exactly a bailout. They asked for a cash transfusion. They promised to pay it back with interest. Lo and behold, they have, and 3 years later Ford, Chrysler, and GM are still in business. They have fewer employees than they had 3 years ago. They have fewer auto plants than they had, but they have changed the wage-
benefit structure and made some changes in their health care costs and the way they administer health care costs which are now overseen by the United Auto Workers. As I said earlier, the moneys we invested in those two companies, Chrysler and GM, was money that has been repaid, largely, with interest.
The Postal Service, in 2011, is in a situation not unlike where our auto industry was a couple years ago. Given their market share, the Postal Service has more employees than they need. The Postal Service has more post offices than they need. They have more processing centers around the country than they need. What they would like to be able to do is not to fire employees, not to abrogate labor contracts. What they have asked to do is to do what the auto industry did in working with their workers; that is, to incentivize people at the Postal Service who are eligible to retire to go ahead and retire. There are about 125,000 of them. We have seen the Postal Service head count drop from 800,000 employees a decade ago to a little under 600,000 today. The Postal Service needs to reduce the head count by another 100,000 or so over the next couple years by incentivizing people eligible to retire to go ahead and retire. The Postal Service thinks they can do that for about
$2 billion. By doing that, 100,000 Postal Service employees will be eligible to retire. That will save the Postal Service $8 billion a year going forward.
Last year, the Postal Service lost $10 billion, and in the years to come they are projected to lose about $20 billion. We could literally address about half of that financial challenge with one fell swoop, incentivize employees eligible to retire.
The Postal Service is interested in being able to close some post offices. They would like to be able to consolidate some post offices--
where they have two, make one. In some cases, they would like to be able to take the services they provide at a post office and offer them at maybe a retail outlet that is open more than 6 days a week or maybe a retail outlet open 24/7, potentially put postal services in some supermarkets in communities across the country, put them in some convenience stores or maybe in pharmacies. The idea would not be to provide worse service; the idea would be to provide better service in a lot of instances.
There are 33,000 post offices in the country. The Postal Service is looking today at 3,700 of them to decide whether they are viable. Under current law, the Postal Service can close a post office. They cannot do it solely on economic grounds, but they can close a post office pretty much at their volition and maybe have a cursory conversation with the community but not much.
The legislation we have proposed would say that the post office, as they look at these 3,700 post offices that are under review--and perhaps others in the future--that before they go about closing any of them, the Postal Regulatory Commission--which is responsible for setting service standards for the post office--would have to be part of that decisionmaking process in these communities across America. They would make sure the service standards the Regulatory Commission--the regulators, if you will, for the post office--has established are going to be met in the future if a post office is closed or post offices are consolidated or the services are colocated. This has to be a transparent process, where the folks who live and work in those communities have the opportunity to be full participants in that decisionmaking.
With respect to the closure of mail processing centers, there are over 500 of them across the country. The Postal Service would like to close as many as 300 of them. Under the legislation we have proposed, there would be the opportunity for communities, businesses, small and large, postal customers, residential customers, and others to have the opportunity to make clear whether the close of a mail processing center in their town or community would somehow be inopportune and a real detriment to that community in ways that are not fair.
Those are three things that the postal service wants to be able to do: address their head count needs, take a close look at how many post offices we have and whether those services can be provided in a more cost-effective way, and the third is to look at the 500-plus mail processing centers we have and try to figure out how many of those can be closed.
The Postal Service delivers mail from my State to the Presiding Officer's State in Minnesota--I can mail a letter today and probably it would get out there on Friday or maybe Saturday. The standard service today is, in some cases, next-day service; in some cases, service can be as much as 3 days. What the Postal Service has asked is, they will still be able to do 1-day service, but they would like for the standard to be officially 2 to 3 days. That is one of the things they are asking for the opportunity to do, and our bill let's them do that.
The other thing the Postal Service has asked for is some relief, if you will--not a bailout, not taxpayer dollars--with the health care costs. Currently, the Postal Service pays into Medicare for its employees. They are the second largest payer into Medicare of all the employers in the country. They also pay into something called the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program. We have the Postal Service sort of paying twice for health care service for its retirees. People 65 and over, 85 percent of them are eligible for Medicare. If they are not, they are still eligible for the Federal employees health benefits as retirees. The Postal Service has asked to do what a lot of other companies do. What a lot of other companies have asked is that Medicare would be their primary source of health care coverage. In addition to that, the Postal Service would provide a Medigap plan to fill the gaps that Medicaid and Medicare do not cover. We think that is a reasonable request. We have also given the Postal Service the opportunity to negotiate with the labor unions to see if it might make sense for the Postal Service to withdraw from the Federal Employees Health Benefit Program and establish their own plan for roughly 1 million people. They will have a chance to study that and decide whether that makes sense.
I will mention three other things we believe the Postal Service can do to reduce costs. One of those is the way they deliver the mail. For a lot of folks in my home, the mail is delivered to our front door. There is a mailbox by our front door. What we are suggesting in our legislation is that in some cases the Postal Service looks at whether that is an efficient way to deliver the mail or maybe is curbside delivery fine. If someone has a mailbox, the letter carrier puts the mail in the mailbox and doesn't have to get out, park the vehicle, walk up to the house and put it in the mailbox and walk back to the vehicle. A fair amount of money can be saved there.
There is money that can be saved in the way workers' comp is handled for Postal Service employees--and we also believe for Federal employees and the President agrees--and we have that legislation in this bill too.
In addition, in finding ways to save money, I would hasten to add it is important for the Postal Service to find new ways to make money. We have seen the TV ads about flat-rate boxes. If it fits, it ships. The price is pretty good, and the service is pretty good too. That is the kind of idea we need more of from the Postal Service. The Postal Service has a partnership with FedEx and UPS. Most people think of them as competitors, but actually the Postal Service has partnered with FedEx and UPS. FedEx and UPS don't want to deliver to every door in America every day for 6 days a week. They don't want to do that. They simply ask the Postal Service to deliver to those doors that FedEx and UPS don't want to deliver to on a particular day, and the Postal Service makes money doing this. They make a lot of money doing this. When the holiday season comes upon us, we will find there is a need for--a lot of people don't just go to brick-and-mortar stores to buy holiday gifts, they want to order online, and the Postal Service can participate broadly in that business too.
The last thing I wish to mention is this: In addition to making money, we have to come up with new ideas. Those are a couple ideas that work. There are others. We are looking for ways to save money in State and local government. Why not consolidate some of the operations in post office buildings. We have a couple more tenants and we can provide service there for other purposes. We do that for passports. Why not do it for other things? We will hear a lot about virtual mailboxes in the days to come and whether that might be a new piece of business for the post office to be involved in as well.
Let me close by saying this: I think as we go forward in this process, we need to be mindful of the Golden Rule, to treat people the way we want to be treated. That includes customers of the Postal Service, be they businesses or residential customers, employees of the Postal Service, the taxpayers. We need to treat everybody the way we want to be treated.
The last thing I would say, my friend from Tennessee, who is standing, and I are two people here who believe we ought to be serious about solving the big problems, as is the Presiding Officer. There are a lot of people who think we are incapable of dealing with big challenges these days.
This is a big challenge. The Postal Service is one of the two largest employers in this country. The consequences of the Postal Service going down next year are not what we want to see visited on this country. Seven million jobs would be in jeopardy. If we simply try to put them on autopilot and let the taxpayers pay for it, it would be over $200 billion more of a hit on the Treasury.
This is a big challenge. This is one we can fix. To the extent we can pull together in the Senate, as we have done in our committee on this issue, I think we will set a good example for our Nation to say: Yes, we can still take on a tough problem, and we can fix it--not in a year or two or three from now but this year.
With that, I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Tennessee.
Mr. CORKER. Mr. President, I know we are rotating right now. What I thought I might do is yield just a couple of minutes to Senator Blumenthal, and then let him yield back to me if that would be OK.
But I do want to thank Senator Carper for his leadership on this issue. We have looked at this bill and others, and we are glad they have been able to come to an agreement between each other. Obviously, the issue of the Postal Service is one of the big issues we need to deal with. I agree with him. I think that is something we can do now. I thank him for his leadership.
I yield back for the Senator from Connecticut.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Connecticut.
Mr. BLUMENTHAL. Mr. President, I thank the Senator from Tennessee, Mr. Corker, for very graciously beginning this discussion. I want to join in thanking the distinguished Senator from Delaware for all of his hard work and his very successful and insightful discussion this morning. It is a problem that concerns all of us very deeply and immediately, and his leadership has been an enormous contribution to the Nation on this issue.
The GAIN Act
I am pleased to be here today with Senator Corker to discuss a problem that is spreading across the country. It is a public health threat to our troops, our children, our frail, and our elderly involving the spread of mutant germs, so-called superbugs, that are resistant, sometimes even immune to existing antibiotics.
I have been very proud of the work Senator Corker and I have done together. He has joined me, and we have been joined by Senators Bennet, Hatch, Casey, Alexander, Coons, and Roberts in the Senate, and by Representatives Gingrey and DeGette in the House, along with a very bipartisan group of respected Members there on an issue that is truly bipartisan. I wish to yield to Senator Corker and then continue my remarks on an issue that ought to concern us very closely and immediately.
Reports from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggest that these infections are not only prevalent but spreading across the country. I have a detailed set of charts that demonstrate this problem. He and I have developed what I think is a solution the Congress can consider in order to provide incentives for development of new antibiotics, new medicine, that can help the Nation prevent the spread of these kinds of diseases.
So with that, I yield for the distinguished Senator from Tennessee.
The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Udall of New Mexico). The Senator from Tennessee.
Mr. CORKER. Thank you, Mr. President. I am sure the Chair is familiar with us going back and forth, and I thank the Chair. I thank my friend from Connecticut. I know he mentioned the Senators who have joined us in this effort, as well as the House Members on the other side of the Capitol, in a bipartisan way.
First, I thank him for his leadership on this issue and for approaching our office about it. I know the public watches Washington and wonders if there is ever anything that is done in a bipartisan way. There are actually lots of efforts that are undertaken that way, and I am very glad to be working with him and his staff who have been very professional and, hopefully, this bill can become law.
The problem is that we have these drug-resistant bacteria called superbugs. All of us have read and heard about them. They are becoming harder and harder to treat because we lack the new antibiotics capable of combating these infections. It is actually scary when we think about what is happening in many facilities across our country. So it is obviously crucial to discover new antibiotics so we can stay ahead of this growing trend of drug resistance.
Drug discoveries, obviously, don't happen overnight. Action is needed now to ensure that we have access to these lifesaving medications when we need them.
These are serious infections. They are definitely life threatening to the patients, especially children and the elderly. In fact, the CDC, the Centers for Disease Control, has named this antibiotic resistance as one of the top public health concerns in our country.
According to the Infectious Disease Society of America, 100,000 deaths and 360,000 hospitalizations result from antibiotic-resistant infections each year in the United States. In my State of Tennessee, nearly 2,000 cases of MRSA are reported annually. MRSA is a common and very dangerous type of antibiotic-resistant bacteria often found in hospital settings. Again, I am sure all of us know of cases where this has happened to loved ones, friends, and others.
The financial impact of these infections is also staggering, costing our health care system $35 billion to $45 billion annually.
This problem is also threatening the health of our troops abroad. One particular type of bacteria, known as a Ramibacterium, is striking hundreds of wounded soldiers coming back from Iraq. Since 2003, more than 700 U.S. soldiers have been infected or colonized with this life-
threatening bacteria.
While bacterial infections continue to become more resistant to traditional antibiotics, innovation of new antibiotics capable of combating these infections has slowed by an alarming rate. FDA approval of these new antibiotics has decreased by 70 percent since the 1980s. Between 2003 and 2007, there were five new antibiotics approved by the FDA compared to 16 new antibiotics from 1983 to 1987.
This bill, the GAIN Act, provides meaningful market incentives and reduces regulatory burdens to encourage the development of new antibiotics that will help us save lives and reduce health care costs. Specifically--and I appreciate the way the Senator from Connecticut has approached this--the bill provides 5 additional years of exclusivity to new drugs developed to treat these superbugs.
The bill also gives these antibiotics priority status during the FDA review process so they can move through more quickly. It encourages the FDA to revisit the clinical trial guidelines for antibiotics. By encouraging a more robust antibiotic pipeline, we can help ensure patients have access to lifesaving treatments while also reducing health care spending.
The GAIN Act is a straightforward, commonsense bill that provides market incentives to encourage innovation without putting Federal dollars at stake. Antibiotic resistance is a growing issue that we must address to properly prepare for the future.
Dr. William Evans, the director and CEO of St. Jude Children's Hospital in Tennessee, recently wrote a letter supporting this bill. Many of my colleagues know of St. Jude and the wonderful work they do for children across our country. Here is his quote:
We don't want to find ourselves in a situation in which we have been able to save a child's life after a cancer diagnosis, only to lose them to an untreatable multi-drug resistant infection.
I wish to thank my colleague again, Senator Blumenthal from Connecticut, for his leadership on this bill, and I look forward to working with him to ensure it gets proper consideration in the Senate.
Also, I ask unanimous consent that letters of support be printed in the Record from the following organizations: St. Jude Children's Hospital, Le Bonheur Children's Hospital, University of Tennessee Health Sciences Center, and East Tennessee State University Quillen College of Medicine.
There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in the Record, as follows:
St. Jude
Children's Research Hospital,
Memphis, TN, October 14, 2011.Hon. Richard Blumenthal,Hon. Bob Corker,U.S. Senate, Washington, DC.
Dear Senators Blumenthal and Corker: I am writing on behalf of St. Jude Children's Research Hospital to express our support for the Senate companion bill of H.R. 2182, the Generating Antibiotic incentives Now (GAIN) Act of 2011. The mission of St. Jude Children's Research Hospital is to advance cures, and means of prevention, for pediatric catastrophic diseases through research and treatment. The GAIN Act represents an important first step in addressing a public health issue that significantly affects our mission. We believe that the legislation is of great importance not only to our children's hospital and the children and families we serve, but to children and families across the country.
Many of the children we treat at St. Jude have compromised immune systems, and are particularly vulnerable to bacterial infections. At the same time that multi-drug resistant strains of Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus Aureus (MRSA) and gram negative bacteria are on the rise, the number of new antibiotics being approved has dropped precipitously. A study conducted at St. Jude and published in Pediatric Blood & Cancer compared MRSA colonization rates in pediatric oncology patients in 2000-2001 with rates in 2006-2007. The study showed an increasing prevalence of colonization with MRSA observed in children with cancer at our institution, and that the colonization was associated with infection. Recurrent MRSA infections were seen in 22 percent of patients. A copy of the study is enclosed.
We applaud the work that you and your bipartisan group of colleagues are doing to address the issue of the dwindling antibiotic pipeline. We believe that the GAIN Act is an important first step in stimulating new antibiotic development and getting lifesaving drugs to the children we treat. We don't want to find ourselves in a situation in which we have been able to save a child's life after a cancer diagnosis, only to lose them to an untreatable multi-drug resistant infection. Thank you for your leadership in the Senate to ensure that we have the tools we need to treat the children entrusted to our care.
Sincerely,
William E. Evans,Director and CEO.
____
Le Bonheur,
Children's Hospital,
Memphis, TN, October 26, 2011.Hon. Bob Corker,U.S. Senate, Dirksen Senate Office Building, Washington, DC.
Dear Senator Corker: on behalf of the patients, families, physicians and associates of Le Bonheur Children's Hospital, I commend your efforts to invigorate the development of new antibiotics to combat the spread of antibiotic resistant bacteria with the introduction of the GAIN Act. Thank you for taking the lead on this important public health concern.
Antibiotic infections have been on the rise for many years, disproportionately affecting children and increasing the cost of care. We applaud your efforts to encourage antibiotic innovation, an important step to ensuring that lifesaving medicine will be available to the many children who need them.
Please let us know how we can assist in passing this important legislation. Our many pediatric physicians, researchers and clinicians are available to lend whatever support you need. Thank you, Senator Corker, for working to improve healthcare for children.
Sincerely,
Meri Armour,
President and C.E.O.Le Bonheur Children's Hospital.
____
The University of Tennessee
Health Science Center,
Memphis, TN, October 25, 2011.Hon. Bob Corker,U.S. Senate,Washington, DC.
Dear Senator Corker. We, here at Le Bonheur Children's Hospital and the Department of Pediatrics at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center, applaud your efforts to spur development of new antibiotics to combat the spread of antibiotic resistant bacteria with the introduction of the GAIN Act. Thank you for taking the lead on this important public health concern.
Antibiotic-resistant infections have been on the rise for many years, in many cases disproportionately affecting children. For example, infections caused by methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (``MRSA'') have been particularly frequent in children and may be life-threatening. My colleagues Steve Buckingham and Sandy Arnold and I have published a series of articles summarizing our experience with these infections and discussing the impact of antibiotic resistance on the treatment of children with serious infections.
We commend your efforts to encourage antibiotic innovation that will bring lifesaving medications to the many children
(and adults) who need them.
As a pediatric infectious disease specialist, please let me know how I can assist and support your efforts on this important issue. Thank you, Senator Corker, for your hard work and vision.
Sincerely,B. Keith English, M.D.,
Professor and Interim Chair, Department of Pediatrics, University of Tennessee Health Science Center Interim Pediatrician-in-Chief, Chief, Division of Infectious Diseases Le Bonheur Children's Hospital.
____
East Tennesssee State University, Office of the Vice
President for Health Affairs,
Johnson City, TN, November 2, 2011.Hon. Bob Corker,Dirksen Senate Office Building, U.S. Senate, Washington, DC.
Dear Senator Corker: We are writing on behalf of East Tennessee State University to express our support of S. 1734, the Generating Antibiotic Incentives Now (GAIN) Act of 2011.
At the turn of the last century, infectious diseases were the leading cause of death in America. Between improvements in sanitation and the development of vaccines and antibiotics, the impact of infectious diseases on human health has been greatly reduced in our country. However, we are concerned that as microorganisms develop resistance to existing antimicrobial agents there is an increased possibility that we will see a resurgence in some infectious diseases that are currently under control. Additionally, with continued growth of the world's population, and the shortened travel times between continents, resistant organisms have the capacity to spread quickly across the globe. We believe that the GAIN Act, S. 1734, will be a first step in stimulating new research in antibiotic development to address a predictable public health crisis.
East Tennessee State University Division of Health Affairs
(including the Colleges of Medicine, Nursing, Pharmacy, Public Health, and Clinical and Rehabilitative Health Sciences) has research programs strongly focused on meeting the needs of our region, particularly needs of the underserved and other vulnerable populations. We recognize the necessity to promote advancements in research related to infectious disease and currently conduct clinical and basic science research in these areas. We feel that the GAIN Act will expedite our efforts to produce novel treatments for disease and in turn, reduce the related burden of illness to the region and state.
Sincerely,Wilsie S. Bishop,
Vice President for Health Affairs and Chief Operating Officer.Philip C. Bagnell,
Dean of Medicine.Gregory A. Ordway,
Chair of Pharmacology.Priscilla B. Wyrick,
Chair of Microbiology.
Mr. CORKER. With that, I yield the floor for my good friend, someone with whom I have thoroughly enjoyed working on this issue. I thank him again for his leadership on a very important issue that matters to all of us.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Connecticut.
Mr. BLUMENTHAL. Again, my thanks to my very distinguished colleague from Tennessee whose leadership and contribution to this bill has been instrumental from the very start. I welcome him and have been thankful for his partnership on this issue.
As my colleague from Tennessee said so well, these antibiotic-
resistant drugs are a spreading scourge. Reports from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggest that MRSA infections are responsible for more than 17,000 deaths in the United States every year--more than AIDS and many other diseases that are regarded as public health threats. All 50 States have seen rates of antibiotic-
resistant E. coli infections double in less than 10 years.
A lesser known bug, Acintobacter, a bacteria that affects increasing numbers of our troops serving in Iraq, has infected more than 700 of our servicemembers since 2003. The numbers are continuing to rise. Those numbers are alarming. I have some charts I will show in just a moment that will be even more graphic. But to put a human face on this problem, Jamel Sawyer, a former college football player from Norwalk, CT, knows all too well the crippling impact of these antibiotic-
resistant infections.
He was in school in Boston. He suffered from severe back pain and a rising temperature. He went to the hospital and was told he was suffering from a kind of antibiotic-resistant staph infection which surmounted multiple rounds of antibiotic treatment. He was left paralyzed and unable to walk. He was paralyzed from the waist down and remains very severely handicapped as a result. Right now he is fighting to gain back his ability to walk and function normally.
We are in an arms race with superbugs. We are in a fight with antibiotic-resistant mutating germs that are a spreading, persistent, and pernicious problem all around the country. The resistance is fueled by careless use of antibiotics, the overuse of certain kinds of antibiotics, or failure to use them properly, as when they are not used for the full round when they should be and thereby lead to greater resistance on the part of these germs.
Failure to use these antibiotics properly and failure to exercise good stewardship is important, but it is not the only cause. We need to stay ahead of these germs in an arms race to develop new antibiotics and provide incentives for those antibiotics.
The problems we are encountering are shown by these charts, beginning first in the year 2000 with antibiotic-resistant E. coli. As this chart makes clear, nowhere--in no State in the United States--was there a rate above 10 percent. That accounts for the light yellow pattern here.
In 2009, the situation was very different. In States across the country--major States, including New York and the entire East--the rate was above 35 percent. In many parts of the Midwest, including the Presiding Officer's State, the rate was above 25 percent. E. coli resistance to treatment by this commonly used antibiotic presents a threat particularly to our children and our elderly.
The next chart I wish to show concerns Acintobacter. This bacteria has afflicted particularly our troops coming back from Iraq. It is, in fact, nicknamed ``Iraqtobacter'' by many military doctors, and it has literally jumped enormously in the number of cases.
This was the case in the year 2000, showing almost everywhere rates below 5 percent. The present incidence is very different, alarmingly so. In some States it is above 50 percent, including, I believe, New Mexico, and in many parts of the East above 30 to 40 percent.
This Acintobacter incidence is something that is a major national security problem insofar as 700 troops have been infected with Acintobacter, and as Robert Jackson, the director of Military Families United said so eloquently about this disease:
The worst part is that many of our men and women in uniform survive the war effort only to return and die of this infection in the continental United States. Thus Military Families United strongly supports the GAIN Act, which would ensure that American companies have the motivation to combat the most modern, multi-drug resistant diseases.
I brought these charts simply to show how the spread of these superbug infections has affected the entire United States. There are other diseases like MRSA and VRSA. They are a set of acronyms that are comparable to, in effect, a modern plague.
Fully one-third of all deaths from H1N1 Swine Flu, for example, in 2009 were actually caused by antibiotic-resistant bacteria. According to the Infectious Disease Society of America, 100,000 deaths and 360,000 hospitalizations in the United States resulted from antibiotic-
resistant infections, at a cost of $26 billion to our health system annually.
What is the reason for the rise and spread of these diseases? Well, the main reason is we do not have new antibiotics to treat and cure them. The reason for that dearth of new antibiotics goes to the fundamentals of modern economics involving the drug industry. Antibiotics are prescribed and used for a course of 2 weeks, if they work. There are blockbuster drugs and miracle drugs that are used for the treatment of chronic diseases and, therefore, are used often for lifetimes. The revenues from those blockbuster drugs are themselves blockbuster products and profits.
The problem with antibiotics is the lack of economic incentive to develop them in the modern economics of the pharmaceutical industry. The GAIN Act would remedy that problem. It would incentivize the development and research required to implement and discover these new drugs. It would extend the data exclusivity rights for 5 years. It would speed and expedite consideration of these drugs by the FDA. It would provide a fast track, essentially, and enable prompt review. It would moderate and eliminate the kinds of regulatory hurdles which is so important in providing not only incentives but also a track to consumers so they would have the availability of these drugs.
I personally would welcome other ideas if there are any for strengthening the incentives for development of these antibiotics that are so important to treat and cure the antibiotic-resistant germs that cause these problems. I hope we will continue to have the kind of bipartisan momentum in favor of these new developments.
I close by saying we are all talking about jobs on the floor of the Senate these days. This proposal is also, in a way, a jobs-related program. It would enable small innovators and small businesses--one is, for example, Rib-X Pharmaceuticals in New Haven, a 50-person company trying to develop new drugs through innovation. The kind of boost and incentive this bill will provide is very important for the innovators of America who are out there trying to provide cures for Acintobacter, MRSA, E. coli--all of them superbugs--providing a solution to this problem that I think is very much urgent and in the interests of our Nation.
This measure is a first step. I hope we can come together to enact it. I urge the Senate to join me in doing so.
Mr. President, I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Illinois is recognized.
Somalia and Al-Shabaab
Mr. KIRK. Mr. President, I rise today to thank the Government of Kenya and its President Kibaki for the difficult decision he and his government have made with regard to Somalia.
We all recall Somalia as the site of the Black Hawk Down tragedy in 1993. As much as Americans might wish to ignore that troubled country, I do not think we can. Somalia is a country whose government collapsed in 1991 but has now given rise to what is arguably the second largest terror presence on planet Earth, called al-Shabaab. The country also represents a new 21st-century threat of piracy across America's Persian Gulf oil supply lines.
On October 16, at the invitation of the Somali Transitional Federal Government, the Kenyan Government launched Operation Protect the Country against the al-Shabaab terrorist organization based in Somalia.
We all recall that al-Shabaab is an al-Qaida affiliate that has been designated as a foreign terrorist organization by the United States since 2008. It is responsible for multiple attacks in Somalia, Kenya, and Uganda, including a suicide bombing in July 2010 in Kampala that killed 76 people, including an American citizen, 25-year-old Nate Henn of North Carolina who worked for the Invisible Children nonprofit organization. Also, on October 25, al-Shabaab kidnapped and is still holding another American citizen, 32-year-old Jessica Buchanan of Virginia.
About 4,000 Kenyan troops are now approaching the critical Somali port city of Kismayo where al-Shabaab makes most of its money and is headquartered. The success of the Kenyan operation would mean a significant weakening of al-Shabaab's ability to plan and execute terrorist attacks and would greatly support the security of the region and the United States.
Also joining in the fight against al-Shabaab are prominent local tribal militias, including the Ahlu Sunnah Waljamaah, the ASWJ; the Raas Kaambooni Front; and the Jubaland militia formed under the former TFG defense minister, Mohamed Abdi Mohamed.
I commend the Kenyan Government and the allied groups for their action, and the United States and NATO should support this Kenyan action.
Al-Shabaab poses a significant threat to America's national security and to Kenya's safety. Since 2009, al-Shabaab has conducted at least 10 attacks on Kenyan soil and the territorial seas along her coastline. In a particularly heinous crime, on October 1, al-Shabaab kidnapped a disabled French woman on Kenyan soil and dragged her to Somalia, where she later died. Last week, al-Shabaab militants also threw a grenade into a Nairobi nightclub.
Because of al-Shabaab's refusal to allow access for humanitarian organizations to relieve famine, Kenya is also now home to 600,000 Somali refugees. In many ways, the famine and distress that is now evident in Somalia should be called the al-Shabaab famine.
Al-Shabaab also poses a direct threat to the United States by actively radicalizing and recruiting American citizens.
On October 29, a suicide bomber attacked an African Union base in Mogadishu, killing himself and 10 other human beings. The suspect, Abdisalan Hussein Ali, was a 22-year-old American citizen who grew up in Minneapolis and studied to be a doctor before he suddenly disappeared to join al-Shabaab in 2008. The recording he allegedly made before his death contained a disturbing message aimed at young Americans. He said:
Today, jihad is what is most important. It's not important that you become a doctor, or some sort of engineer.
According to the FBI, Ali was one of 30 American citizens who have now joined al-Shabaab. In August of 2010, the FBI arrested 2 and charged 12 more individuals in Minnesota, Alabama, and California ``with acts of terrorism that include providing money, personnel, and other material support to the Somali-based terrorist organization al Shabaab.'' At the time, Attorney General Eric Holder called it ``a deadly pipeline that has routed funding and fighters to al Shabaab from cities across the United States.''
On July 27, an investigation by the House Committee on Homeland Security found the following:
Al-Shabaab has an active recruitment and radicalization network inside the U.S. targeting Muslim-Americans in Somali communities. It also ensnared a few non-Somali Muslim-American converts, such as a top Shabaab commander:
At least 40 or more Americans--
According to the House--
have joined Shabaab;
So many Americans have joined that at least 15 of them have been killed fighting with Shabaab, as well as three Canadians;
Three Americans who returned to the U.S. were prosecuted, and one awaits extradition from The Netherlands;
At least 21 or more American Shabaab members overseas remain unaccounted for and pose a direct threat to the U.S. homeland.
The House said:
Al-Shabaab has the intent and capability to conduct attacks or aid core Al Qaeda and Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula in Yemen with striking U.S. interests and the U.S. homeland.
They said that al-Shabaab has openly pledged loyalty and support to al-Qaida and al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula in Yemen and has cemented an alarming set of operational ties to both groups.
The House report also points out that after the successful U.S. operation to kill Osama bin Laden, al-Shabaab's leadership eulogized bin Laden and vowed revenge against the United States. Omar Hammami, another al-Shabaab leader raised in the United States, said he ``swore
[a] blood revenge against his own homeland for the May 1 killing of Osama Bin Laden.''
Al-Shabaab poses a grave threat to regional stability and to our own national security. I thank the Kenyan Government and their allies in Somalia for taking action. Our administration and our NATO allies should support Kenya. We should also make sure that in this support we have the objective to collapse al-Shabaab in Somalia. With luck, while al-Shabaab may have found a recruit or two among American citizens to wage jihad against their own country, there, hopefully, will be no al-
Shabaab to fight for if they ever reach Somalia.
Mr. President, I yield back.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Massachusetts is recognized.
Mr. KERRY. Thank you, Mr. President.
Mr. President, I believe we are currently debating the motion to proceed to go to the energy, water, et cetera, package. Included in that is the proposal of the President that he has sent up asking the Senate to vote on the question of an infrastructure bank.
I believe there was a prior vote in the Senate on that in the context of the Jobs Act, which we all know failed at that time. There are some signs that this may wind up being a partisan effort here, but I hope colleagues will stop and think very carefully about the infrastructure bank proposal and what it represents to our country.
Whether we can get it over the hurdle at this moment, I do not know. But it is an idea whose time has come, and I am confident in the next weeks or months, hopefully, the Senate will embrace this concept. The reason for doing so is very simple. Colleagues on both sides of the aisle are increasingly reminded when they go home, as well as familiar here just in the general dialog about where we are going in our country, of the enormous deficit reduction--the deficit; it is on my mind--of the infrastructure deficit we face in this country as a whole.
So I want colleagues to stop and think hard about a simple question: How are we going to build America? How are we going to build America going forward so that we can do what our parents and our grandparents did for us, providing us with the basic infrastructure of a nation that has been able to allow people to move easily from home to work to places of commerce across the country, an interstate highway system, all of our airports, our train stations, all of the assets that provided for the strength of our Nation and for the kind of communities we live in? None of it appeared out of nowhere. It was built because people had a vision, people had an idea about how you make communities strong, and also how economies work. The fact is that some of the greatest projects in our country, whether it is some of the great bridges we look at today--Golden Gate Bridge, Triborough Bridge, George Washington, countless bridges across the Potomac and elsewhere--the tunnels, the roads, our water treatment facilities, our airports, and the airline system we have, all of those things contribute to the strength of our country.
But everyone here knows we are not currently pursuing a set of projects calculated to make America more competitive and to continue that rich history and tradition of building for the future. We are busy living off the assets that were created by the generations that preceded us. So the question has to be asked by every colleague here: Are we going to appropriate the money for grants? And the answer is no, partly because the deficit and the debt are telling us in loud terms we do not have those kinds of funds right now, but also because everybody here sees the difficulty we are having trying to get the highway bill reauthorized or the FAA bill reauthorized in order to do the things we need to do.
The proposal for an infrastructure bank is a proposal that recognizes this fiscal reality. We simply do not have and will not allocate the types of funds necessary to do the job every American knows has to be done. That does not mean the job cannot be done. There is a way to do it. And the way to do it is to invite other people's money, the private sector, not tax dollars, to come to the table and invest in these projects, where these projects have revenue streams that will support that kind of investment.
One of the important features of the infrastructure bank that I ask colleagues to focus on is the fact that this bank is not a grant entity. There will be no grants. It is exclusively loans, and exclusively loans that meet the fiduciary test of their ability to be able to be repaid, to have a revenue stream that will support the loans themselves.
I would say to my colleagues, some of them I know have asked me occasionally: Well, is this going to be an entity such as Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac? Is it going to be one of those government-supported entities that got some folks in trouble? The answer is no, resoundingly and profoundly no. It is not similar in any way whatsoever. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac issued stock. They were for-profit entities listed on the New York Stock Exchange. They were using the Federal guarantee on a loan to actually leverage their position in the marketplace in competition with other entities and for-profits. This bank is not for profit. No issuance of stock will be listed on any exchange. It will exist exclusively for the purpose of lending to those types of projects that meet the highest fiscal standards with respect to the ability of those projects to be repaid.
In fact, in each and every lending situation, the infrastructure bank will make a risk analysis, just as you do on any deal in Wall Street. There is a risk analysis, and a risk factor will be assigned to that deal. In fact, fees will be charged to the borrowers, to the dealmakers, in order to cover that level of risk. That will be part of the cost of the transaction.
The benefit of this infrastructure bank is that by virtue of the Treasury Department providing a discount for the Federal Treasury guarantee, you actually make the loan attractive in terms of the private sector in competition, and it does so at a level, as I said, of risk analysis that does not put the Federal Government or the taxpayer on line and at risk for the measured level of the loan itself, but only the risk which is credited or put on the books in terms of what is carried by the Treasury Department as the risk of this particular loan.
So, in fact, if you look at the type of projects that are authorized by this--only energy projects, transportation projects, and water projects--in the better part of the country, they are limited to $100 million size or up, and there is a set-aside for rural communities. In the rural communities, the level of loans could be $25 million or up, because obviously in parts of rural America, you have smaller kinds of projects, and we want everyone in the country to be able to share from the benefits of this kind of an infrastructure bank.
I would say to my colleagues, this bank has bipartisan support. It has been introduced in slightly different forms from what the President has put it in. But the fundamentals of the bank in structure and concept are the same. It has been introduced by Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas, who is a coauthor; Senator Lindsey Graham, Senator Mark Warner are the original cosponsors. But it has other cosponsors and broader support including, I might add, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which is a strong supporter of the infrastructure bank, and was present at the announcement of this legislation, as well as the AFL-CIO.
Why is this infrastructure bank necessary? What is it we need? Well, everybody knows that the experts are telling us we have a $2.2 trillion infrastructure deficit in America. That means there are over $2.2 trillion of projects around the country, countless bridges in countless communities around the country, roads or tunnels or airports, countless projects which need to be repaired, upgraded, or put in place at first instance.
We are that far behind, a $2.2 trillion deficit to what we ought to be doing. The American Civil Society of Architects and Engineers tells us that we could spend about $250 billion a year for the next 40 years just to bring our roads up to par, and we are not about to do that, we know, because we do not have the money, because we are not getting that kind of an appropriation now for our initiatives.
Listen to what Oklahoma City Mayor Mike Cornett says: Mayors see up close the deferred maintenance that is going on in the Nation's cities. It is a ticking timebomb. We also know it puts people to work.
Well, Cornett is president of the Republican Mayors and Local Officials Coalition within the U.S. Conference of Mayors. He knows what he is talking about in terms of this deferred maintenance. But the truth is, every Senator here knows. You can go back home and find mayors and State senators, State representatives, Governors, Departments of Transportation--all of them are pleading with us to try to help provide the kinds of funding necessary because they are simply overwhelmed. I might add many of our States are living under court orders to do some of these projects, particularly the water, the combined sewer overflow-water treatment facilities, where communities have sued and you need to do those projects in order to meet the standards. And they are under court order, without understanding where the money is going to come from. But they are under a court order.
The fact is that whether we decide to do these things is going to determine how competitive America is going to be. Right now, everybody knows we are facing a transformational economic challenge. It is different from the challenge we faced in the last century. During that period of time, as we came out of World War II, we were the only major economy in the world left standing. At the end of the war, we had both the vision and foresight as well as the courage to put a lot of money on the line in the Marshall plan to help rebuild Europe and rebuild Japan. And we saw throughout the Cold War the ways in which that investment paid back for the United States of America, indeed for the western world and for the values that we made central to that kind of an investment.
That has changed. It started to change in the eighties and nineties, and now we are seeing, with the rise of less developed countries that are, after all, doing the very things that we encouraged them to do--we told them you have got to liberate your societies to be able to go out and compete in the marketplace, that they needed to open up that market, they needed to trade, they needed to excite capital formation and invest and so forth. That is exactly what they have done. They have not changed their political systems, in many cases, which remain totalitarian and closed, one party, but they have certainly changed their economic systems, and in doing so, they have transformed the marketplace we are competing in. So the United States is not looking at the same playing field, where we had unlimited resources, unlimited capacity to go out and, frankly, win. We could win many times without even trying that hard. But now other people are doing the same things we took for granted. They are competing in science, they are competing in technology, they are competing in manufacturing, they are competing in software, and they are competing all kinds of things that were our domain for a long period of time.
The market globally has changed significantly enough that we are facing a challenge to our ability to be able to remain the No. 1 economy. I heard today that China will probably be the No. 1 economy in the world within 5 or 6 years, much faster than we had anticipated previously. So if the United States is going to compete and get its act together going forward, we have to invest in the infrastructure of our country, because that is how you, No. 1, create jobs, but, No. 2, you provide the ability to move goods, to provide for people, to provide for the quality of life and the kinds of institutions that make a difference to our ability to be able to compete and to live the quality of life we want.
The figures of other people's commitment to infrastructure tell us the story. China is investing 9 percent of its gross domestic product in infrastructure. Europe is investing 5 percent of its GDP in infrastructure. Here in the United States, we are investing somewhere around 2 percent. Figures vary--2.2, 2.1, 2 percent. I think Brazil invested over $240 billion in its infrastructure in the last 3 years, and the Brazilian economy is growing in double digits. North Korea, Mexico, Brazil, China, India, all growing in double digits, and the United States is stuck in this recession, maybe just breaking out of it, but with very uneven growth.
The infrastructure bank is geared to fill a void in our investment abilities in this country. Again, Senators know we are not going to invest billions of dollars of appropriated money--taxpayer dollars--
because of the competition we have in our discretionary funds now because of the way we are heading in terms of the fiscal cliff and debt cliff and because of the challenge of the rising costs in health care and entitlements. We don't have that money.
While we get control of those components of our economy, we need to be investing in the infrastructure of our Nation and putting people back to work. We need to invest in highways, roads, bridges, mass transit, inland waterways, commercial ports, airports, air traffic control systems, passenger rail, including high-speed rail and freight rail systems, and the water sector. We can invest in wastewater treatment facilities, storm water management systems, dams, drinking water treatment facilities, levees, and open space management systems.
In the energy sector, we need transmission in America. We need an energy grid that is modern. We need distribution, storage, energy enhancements for buildings, public and commercial.
There is an extraordinary amount of work to be done--if we decide to do it. Hundreds of billions of dollars is sitting on the side lines right now. It could come in and help us with these projects. The infrastructure bank is precisely the entity that will bring that private capital to the table so that it is the Chinese who are investing in an American infrastructure project that they cannot take back to China; it is here in America. It improves our lives, but it gives them a return on investment for the money they put on the line in a deal, which, frankly, is the kind of deal that will produce the sort of long-term, patient capital investment that I think a lot of people are going to be turning to given the nature of the financial turmoil we see going on in the world today.
We are in a competitive race with other countries to attract this private equity investment. An infrastructure bank could help us put that money to work here at home.
Some people say: Senator, why do you need the infrastructure bank to do this if these deals are so attractive? Why doesn't the money come and they will invest it anyway and so forth?
It doesn't work that way for a number of reasons. First of all, our financial institutions have not developed a long-term infrastructure-lending business. We don't have that in this country the way other banks in other parts of the world do.
If you look at a major American infrastructure transaction over the last few years, guess what. Non-U.S. banks--mostly Australian and European--are the ones providing most of the financing. They are doing it at an average of 20 to 1--20 parts by the non-U.S. banks, the European and Australian banks, and 1 part U.S. investment. Given the troubles the European sovereign market has today, I think it is going to be a very long time before we see a lot of European banks looking to invest over here. Maybe I am wrong.
The lack of investing by our institutions is not because the investment is too risky. The problem is that for a very long time, the vast majority of American infrastructure has been financed through the municipal bond market, the rest largely through Federal grants, which I have said are now under pressure. So there has been no need for large bank lending to be created. As we all know, large bank lending--that market just doesn't happen overnight.
The municipal bond market also relies principally on small retail investors for most of its funding. Because of the way it is designed, it can't access large global pools of capital or, for that matter, pension funds. Pension funds are prohibited from investing in those bonds.
The municipal bond market is not well-suited to fund large, cross-
State, cross-boundary projects, so we need something else. That something else is this kind of infrastructure bank, with all of the very strict limits that have been put into place to keep it from reaching too far. It doesn't cost a lot of money--$10 billion of startup funding. It becomes self-financing. Every loan is a loan that can be repaid because they rely on sources of revenue that are among the most dependable sources of revenue in the marketplace--from energy projects that sell electricity, and you have a pretty regular stream of buyers for that. You have a pretty regular stream of people who need water in their homes and pay for the water. All of these revenue streams--the tolls on bridges, for instance, and these others--have a certainty and longevity to them that make these kinds of deals very attractive.
I say to my colleagues that one of the silver linings of this kind of infrastructure investment is this: For every $1 billion, the Federal Highway Administration tells us you will create, I think, 30,000 jobs. The range of jobs, depending on whom you listen to, goes from about 20,000 to 35,000. Let's say it is 20,000 jobs per billion. People say this bank investment of $10 billion can leverage more than $\1/2\ trillion--$500 billion--of investment, so you are talking 20 million jobs over the course of perhaps 10 years.
I think there are so many compelling reasons for engaging this. Europe has an infrastructure bank. We have State infrastructure banks, but the State infrastructure banks don't have the advantage this bank has of being able to do transboundary, cross-State deals. They also don't have the advantage of having a discount on the lending component coming through the Treasury Department of the Federal component of this--done, as I said, under the strictest fiduciary standards. Only 50 percent of any project can be lending. The rest has to be equity and has to be invested by the other investors in the deal. It could be a combination of investors, but they need to invest.
I close by saying that a modern infrastructure is really the lifeblood of our economy. I don't know how many of my colleagues have taken the Acela to New York, but it is a train that has the ability to go 150 miles an hour. It only goes 150 miles an hour between here and New York for about 18 miles of the trip because you cannot go fast under the Baltimore tunnel because vibrations might cause it to fall in. You cannot go fast over the bridges of the Chesapeake because the train will wind up in the Chesapeake. This is absurd.
Many of us have had the pleasure of having a train ride in China. I rode recently from Beijing to Tianjin--a trip that used to take 8 to 10 hours takes 29 minutes. You are going 200 miles an hour. The water on your table is barely jiggling during the entire ride. It is an extraordinary accomplishment. They are building something like 55,000 miles of that kind of high-speed rail system over there, as they spend their 9 percent of GDP on infrastructure.
We can do better. The United States of America can do better. We know that. We are the country that had invention and building construction in our DNA, the country that went to the Moon and developed these extraordinary technologies that connect human beings around the world instantaneously.
I am convinced that if we put this infrastructure bank together, all of a sudden the United States will attract capital, create jobs, modernize our economy, and have benefits that spill out all across our Nation. I hope our colleagues will get rid of the politics and embrace this idea, which is long overdue.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Oregon is recognized.
Mr. WYDEN. Mr. President, before the Senator leaves the floor, I commend the Senator from Massachusetts. He has said much this afternoon that I certainly agree with.
I also want to touch on one other point about the Senator's work--the Senator from Massachusetts--in this area. The public, perhaps more than anything else, is talking about why people in Washington, DC, cannot work together, why we can't come up with ways to build coalitions. I am not sure people picked up on it in the Senator's remarks, particularly with respect to China. They are investing far more than we are. But he has pulled together the chamber of commerce and the AFL-CIO for an infrastructure package. That doesn't happen by osmosis or because somebody puts out a press release. He put in the time to try to build that coalition, which, of course, is key to getting bipartisan support up here. I want the Senator to know I very much appreciate it. I know he brought exactly the same approach to his work on the supercommittee, trying to find common ground on some of the most challenging issues so that we will generate growth and deal with health care costs.
I have some remarks to make, but I am glad I had a chance to listen to the Senator from Massachusetts because I thought the point he made about bringing people together was important. And I hope people will say, as we look at this transportation package--I just want to get on the bill, frankly, so we can open other kinds of ideas. The Senator has put in a lot of time, and it paid off with coalitions such as the chamber of commerce and the AFL-CIO. That is the kind of approach that will solve some of these big problems.
Mr. KERRY. I thank my friend from Oregon. Nobody works harder on building coalitions than the Senator from Oregon. He has done a superb job on health care and tax policy, so those words mean a lot. I appreciate that. Thank you.
Mr. WYDEN. Mr. President, my sense is that if you tune in on the Senate today--and, of course, the ways of the Senate are always hard to follow. The occupant of the chair is involved in changing the rules of the Senate and has a sense of what I am talking about. You try to figure out what the Senate is up to, and at this point you have learned that today the Senate is working on infrastructure. You hear that word again and again. You roll your eyes and you say: Wake me when the potholes get fixed.
What I want to do for a few minutes this afternoon is try to tie this to what I believe is first and foremost on the minds of the American people, and that is jobs. That is what we hear about morning, noon, and night.
The fact is that we cannot have big-league economic growth in America with little-league transportation systems. It is not possible. If our bridges and roads are falling apart, we simply cannot have the growth we need, and job growth is the No. 1 issue for our people, and literally infrastructure improvement--roads, bridges, and transportation systems and jobs are two sides of the same coin. They go hand in hand. That is point No. 1.
Point No. 2 is on the question of how we stack up to some of our competitors worldwide. If we can't move goods and services efficiently in this country, our businesses are practically in the position where they have to put up a sign and say: We cannot compete with China because when China is making these kinds of investments that we heard Senator Kerry and other colleagues on both sides of the aisle talk about in the last few days, you know what we are up against.
Transportation is the key to moving goods and services efficiently. We have bottlenecks, for example, in my part of the country, in the metropolitan area and, frankly, in rural areas where people could not have dreamed there would be a traffic jam even a few years ago.
Point No. 3 is there is no economic multiplier in our country like transportation. When you make well-targeted investments in transportation, you create jobs for the folks who are building those projects, you create jobs for the people who are selling the equipment, you are creating jobs for folks such as the people in the restaurants who make the ham sandwiches for the workers who are out there building the projects and trying to find ways to help our people avoid traffic and save gas as they try to get to and from work. So this is a big economic multiplier.
And, No. 4, Mr. President, as you know from your experience as a westerner, the history of our part of the world is that private investment has always followed well-targeted public investments. You look all over the West and the great distances our folks have to travel, and you will see again and again the key to getting more private sector investment. In my view, the key to economic recovery is the private sector job growth that is behind the tax reform bill I have with Senator Coats--the first bipartisan tax reform bill. We need private sector job growth in the West. The history of our region is that private sector employment has traditionally followed well-targeted public investments.
What I want to see us do--and what the vote that is coming up is all about--is to have a chance to move to the bill. If we move to the bill, I believe there are all kinds of opportunities for Democrats and Republicans, through amendments and a variety of opportunities, to exchange ideas and to come up with bipartisan approaches. I have had a chance to be part of those kinds of discussions in the last few years.
Look, for example, at the common ground that has developed between Senator Boxer and Senator Inhofe on the Environment and Public Works Committee. They are making a lot of progress in reauthorizing a transportation bill. That is only one example here in the Senate of Democrats and Republicans coming together.
Let me cite two others. In the Economic Recovery Act, I had a chance in the Senate Finance Committee to advance an idea I have been working on for more than 5 years. There was a very large and bipartisan group of us who worked on it. Former Senator Talent was the original Republican, but Senator Thune was involved, Senator Wicker, Senator Collins, and a very large bipartisan group working with colleagues on our side of the aisle. The Senator from Minnesota, Amy Klobuchar, is one who comes to mind, who has been a very thoughtful advocate of improvements in transportation. So in the Senate Finance Committee, as we moved forward with the Economic Recovery Act, Chairman Baucus and then ranking minority member Senator Grassley, in effect, said: Well, we have been hearing about some of these ideas this bipartisan group has been advancing. Let's give them a chance to make their case. I offered the proposal to create something called Build America Bonds. This was a chance to, for the first time, move the Federal Government into the bonding area. It has long been done, of course, at the State and local level, and it received good reviews from the private sector.
I recall the day when Senator Baucus and Senator Grassley asked me what I predicted in terms of the results of the Build America Bonds. I said: We have gotten basically about a year and a half. As you know, the Recovery Act was passed in the winter of 2009, and the IRS had to implement the rules. But when we wrapped up the period for which we issued Build America bonds, more than $181 billion worth of Build America bonds had been used all across the country for capital infrastructure projects. They had been used in big projects on the east coast of the United States--the New Jersey Turnpike was one--and they had been used for roads in southern Oregon.
If you want to talk efficiency, look at the Web site of our State treasurer, Ted Wheeler, who said they were saving in our State 10 percent by issuing these Build America bonds.
I see my friend from California is here, Senator Feinstein, and I believe California was one of the largest users of Build America bonds. To have a program that was envisioned as perhaps selling $5 billion or
$36 billion worth of bonds selling more than $180 billion is an example of what we can do on a bipartisan basis that will put people to work and will actually save money.
The savings we found in Oregon can also be illustrated by the analysis done by the Department of the Treasury that finds the same sort of savings we found in Oregon.
With respect to the Build America bonds, in some respects they were too successful. People said: Oh, perhaps they are being used for more kinds of projects than was acceptable to some people. So once again we said, we are going to come back and try to find a way to generate bipartisan support. My colleague from North Dakota, Senator Hoeven, and I got together and we put forward another proposal--a different version--that we call the TRIP program--the Transportation and Regional Infrastructure Program. Our plan would allow State infrastructure banks to issue bonds to pay for transportation projects, once again having a small supportive role from the Federal Government. The folks who run the numbers at the Joint Committee on Taxation say that with this bipartisan proposal--a Republican from North Dakota, a Democrat from the State of Oregon--it would be possible to get $50 billion worth of transportation projects with this model, with only $12 billion worth of cost over 10 years.
I only illustrate this fact to suggest that if it is possible to get on the bill, I think we are going to see colleagues on the Republican and the Democratic side look to try to cooperate and find some common ground. Senator Kerry made the point about the infrastructure bank, how we got the support of the Chamber of Commerce, Senator Graham and Senator Hutchison and others. I have gone through some of the history of other transportation efforts--that progress is being made now with Senator Boxer and Inhofe on the transportation bill; and the Build America bonds effort, which produced a thirtyfold increase over what was anticipated, literally revolutionizing the municipal bond market and was utilized for big projects, such as the New Jersey Turnpike, and small projects, such as roads in southern Oregon; and now if we can go to this bill--and that is what the vote is all about, whether we actually get on the bill--we will be able to offer alternatives and ideas. Frankly, the provisions that are in the bill in its current form, I don't see how anybody can be against them. The question of highway repair is about as fundamental a function of government as anything one can imagine. So there is plenty in this bill I think colleagues on both sides of the aisle could support.
I have cited a number of examples of bipartisanship in this area, where we can do more in the infrastructure field while we save money, and I hope colleagues will vote--I gather the vote will be tomorrow--to move to the bill and give us a chance to get serious about what I think is central to growing the American economy and at well-targeted investments in transportation.
To me, the question of job creation and infrastructure are literally two sides of the same coin, so I hope the Senate moves to this legislation tomorrow and begins to beef up our effort to deal with a fundamental part of job creation in this country. It is so fundamental that in much of the country, if we don't make the investments, it will literally be the equivalent of saying to our businesses: Put up a sign that says you are not going to be in a position to compete with China right now; come back another time. That is unacceptable to me and to Oregon businesses and Oregon workers. That is why I hope my colleagues will vote to go to the bill.
With that, Mr. President, I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from California.
Mrs. FEINSTEIN. Mr. President, I thank the Senator from Oregon and the Senator from Massachusetts. I happened to hear their comments, and they are both very good and they are both right on.
I was thinking while Senator Wyden spoke about the fact that in the past 6 months those of us on this side have tried on four different occasions to pass legislation related to jobs. We began on May 4 to reauthorize the Small Business Innovation Research Program, which would direct grants to small businesses to develop technologies. That fell on a cloture vote. It did not get 60 votes. It only got 52. We then tried to reauthorize the Economic Development Administration, which I think most of us know essentially is a cost share for communities in distress. That didn't get cloture. It fell 49 to 51. We then tried the President's big jobs act on October 11. That vote fell. It did not get cloture. It only got 50 votes. We then tried taking a part of that on October 20, in order to fund 400,000 school jobs and thousands of jobs for police and fire departments--first responders--throughout the Nation. That was paid for with a .5 percent surtax on people who could well afford to pay for it and probably would want to pay for it, but that fell on a 50-50 vote. We did not get the 60 votes for cloture.
Today, we are trying for a fifth time on a part of the President's bill which has to do with infrastructure. Again, there is a pay-for. It is paid for by a .7 percent tax on people who can well afford to pay that .7 percent. And I think Senator Wyden and I both know the value of keeping this Nation No. 1, because we come from the West. We are on a burgeoning trade basin. We seek competition with countries that have a blooming infrastructure, and we see the plugs and the bumps and the stoppages in this country because of an absence of adequate infrastructure.
I am delighted the Senator is here and that we share this same cause. Hopefully, there is going to be some change in the mindset on the other side of this great Hall and people will realize if we are going to remain No. 1--and we are not No. 1, and I will go into that in my speech--then we have to pass this segment of the President's bill. So I thank Senator Wyden very much for his comments.
As I said, this legislation offered by the majority leader includes the key infrastructure provisions of the President's Jobs Act. It is
$50 billion for our roads, bridges, airports, and transit systems, and it capitalizes a freestanding infrastructure bank with $10 billion. This bill makes the investment without increasing the deficit. Funds appropriated are offset by a .7 percent surcharge only on people who can afford it.
I come from a State where unemployment is high--11.9 percent--and employment in our construction sector is down 44 percent, as you can see from this chart. This is actually California's construction jobs, and you can see where it was in 2000. You see it rise to 900,000 in 2006, and since that time it has plummeted. The fact of the matter is, construction, to a great extent, drives the economy in a number of States, and I think California heads that list. So infrastructure and employment go directly together.
Last week, this body passed legislation authorizing the sale of power from the Hoover Dam. The Hoover Dam is on the border between Nevada and Arizona, and it was built in the 1930s. But it reminds me of the invaluable contribution that infrastructure investments have made in generations past. During the depths of the Great Depression, we stepped forward to help build Hoover Dam. Between 1931 and 1936 our Nation made a massive effort involving thousands of workers--more than 100 of whom lost their lives--to build a powerplant unlike anything the world had ever seen.
This is kind of a working picture of Hoover Dam being built. At the time, many in Congress argued the cost of this engineering marvel was too high and the investment of taxpayer dollars too risky. They opposed efforts to invest in an unproven energy technology like hydropower. The debate was strikingly similar to the debate we hear today. Luckily for the people of California, believers in American infrastructure and technology won the Hoover Dam debate. As the years have passed, the investment has been repaid and the wisdom of Congress' investment remains clear.
Today, Hoover Dam, all these years later is still owned by the American people.
It produces power for the Southwestern United States at less than one-quarter of the market price. It is the quintessential example of why infrastructure spending and investment makes sense. During the depths of the Depression, it gave people jobs and hope. But its benefits were permanent, not fleeting. The investment made in the 1930s is still paying dividends for the economy of the Southwest.
Today, this legislation invests $50 billion in America's transportation infrastructure. That is specifically $27 billion for highways, $9 billion for transit, $4 billion for high-speed rail, $2 billion for Amtrak rail improvements, $3 billion for airports and air traffic control modernization, and $5 billion for discretionary grants and TIFIA loans to multimodal projects. These funds are actually in addition to funding levels in the surface transportation bill which authorizes $52 billion annually and the FAA authorization which authorizes $16 billion annually. The proposal also appropriates $10 billion to capitalize an infrastructure bank. With its own appointed board and CEO, this bank would have the power to issue loan guarantees and loans, at the Federal funds rate, to large projects in water, transportation, and energy.
The bank's authority is similar to the functions performed by EPA's State Revolving Fund, the DOE's Loan Guarantee Program, and the Department of Transportation's TIFIA and RRIF Programs.
In the long term, centralizing these functions in a single infrastructure bank will establish more consistent lending rules and policies. So I think a lot of us have gotten together from time to time to see what could be done to fund a real infrastructure bank. Presently, when we build infrastructure, we have no way of financing it. We put up the whole cost upfront. Most States and cities don't fund their infrastructure that way. They float bonds, and they are amortized over time. So the ability to have an infrastructure bank to loan money, to look at various instruments, to move infrastructure production throughout this country I think is vital. Because the bank will lend, not grant, funds, it will leverage $10 billion into approximately $100 billion in actual investment dollars.
The bank would be particularly beneficial to California--I must say that--and we lead the application list for Federal financing assistance.
For example, Los Angeles citizens voted to tax themselves by raising the sales tax in order to build a desperately needed subway and transit system. They seek a Federal loan. They have the money to pay it back; it comes every year due in sales taxes, but they seek a Federal loan to build the system in 10 years, not 30 years because they need it sooner rather than later. The County of Riverside seeks a Federal loan to build a toll road on the Highway 91 goods movement corridor, through which millions of containers move from the Ports of Los Angeles-Long Beach to every community in America.
I think most people in this body don't understand that approximately 50 percent of all the containers that come into this country, east coast, west coast, come in at Los Angeles-Long Beach, 40 to 50 percent, and they go out in multimodal areas in stacked trains into the Midwest. But they run into all kinds of impediments. There is not separated grades. There is not the ability to move these trains as rapidly as they should be. So if we are going to keep up with the delivery of cargo into the heartland of this country, most of which comes from Asia, we need to do something. California's communities are prepared to repay these loans, but they need help in the beginning.
The Federal Highway Administration estimates that for every $1 billion of Federal transportation spending, 27,822 jobs are produced. It is one of the biggest bang for the buck programs I know of. For every $1 billion in spending, nearly 30,000 jobs are generated. So this bill is a job generator. For every $1 spent on infrastructure projects, it also spurs economic activity, raising the level of gross domestic product by $1.59.
So what is the conclusion? Investing in infrastructure is essential to addressing our nationwide unemployment crisis. Oh, I only wish we could see this.
Congestion is a big problem in this country. I told you about Los Angeles-Long Beach. What I should also tell you is that the average Los Angeles commuter spends 63 hours per year stuck in traffic. That costs
$1,400 a person. In Greater Los Angeles, commuters spend 515 million hours stuck in traffic every year. They waste 407 million gallons of fuel, at a total economic cost of $12 billion. That is just L.A.
I see the Senator from Illinois is on the floor. That is just L.A. I wonder what the Chicago numbers would be. They have to be large. San Francisco, San Jose, San Diego, and Riverside County face all the similar congestion. In each area, the average commuter spends more than 30 hours a year stuck in traffic. That costs us $6.4 billion, and nationwide, congestion is causing Americans to travel 4.8 billion hours more and to purchase an extra 3.9 billion gallons of fuel, for a congestion cost of $115 billion in 1 year. That year happens to be 2009. This is the equivalent of wasting 130 days of flow from the Alaska pipeline each year. It is enormous.
So is this bill necessary? The answer is clearly a resounding yes. In my State, 66 percent of our major roads are in poor condition, 68 percent of our urban interstates are congested, vehicle travel on our highways increased by 27 percent from 1990 to 2007, and 30 percent of our bridges are structurally deficient or functionally obsolete.
One of the best infrastructure projects in the Nation is the repair of Doyle Drive going onto the Golden Gate Bridge. Senator, I wish you could see it because this is a stimulus project and it is amazing because you actually see these dollars at work. Huge ramps are being rebuilt going down to ground level, this great icon of America. The Golden Gate Bridge would never be built today. We just wouldn't build it. If we did, it would take 100 years to do it with all the permits we need. But it is there, it is an icon, and there is a major infrastructure package working on it.
Our Nation's deteriorating surface transportation infrastructure is going to cost the economy more than 876,000 jobs. It is going to suppress GDP growth, it is estimated, by $897 billion by 2020. Poor road conditions cost U.S. motorists $67 billion a year in repairs and operating costs--$333 per motorist. Failing infrastructure will drive the cost of doing business in this country up by $430 billion in the next decade, as the costs to ship goods and raw materials will increase due to bottlenecks and roads that beat up vehicles.
There was a time when America built big things. In the 1800s, we built the transcontinental railroad in one of the great private-public partnerships of all time. We built projects such as the Bay Bridge, the Golden Gate Bridge, the Hoover Dam in the 1920s and the 1930s. In the 1950s and 1960s, we built an interstate highway system unlike anything else anywhere on the planet. In the 1970s, we built the Bay Area Rapid Transit system in San Francisco. This multidecade investment gave America an economic advantage over every country around the world.
Now listen to this. As recently as 2005, the World Economic Forum rated U.S. infrastructure as No. 1 for economic competitiveness--No. 1 in 2005 for economic competitiveness. But in just 5 years, we have slipped to No. 15--not 5, not 10 but 15 in 5 years because we haven't kept up what is a deteriorating infrastructure caused by overuse. The argument is so solid to pass this bill, I can't understand how anyone could vote against it.
China is spending today 9 percent of its GDP on infrastructure. They are our competition. I live on the Pacific Rim. I can tell you, every time any one of us goes to China they will look around the city, whether it is Beijing or Shanghai, and you will count 20 to 50 cranes building in that city, improving infrastructure.
I stood in Shanghai when the head of the government told me: In 10 years, we will build 375 kilometers of underground subway and 25 stations. Guess what. They did and are doing it. We can't do that. It is a problem. Of course, China doesn't have NEPA, it doesn't have CEQA, it doesn't have three dozen permits you have to get. It is easy to write a letter to Mrs. Lee or Mrs. Chu and say: You will move in 30 days because your apartment building is going to be destroyed. That doesn't happen here.
But there is no excuse not to do what is in this bill. There is no impediment to do what is in this bill. It might not take us back to No. 1, but it might take us back to No. 3 or No. 4.
China spends 9 percent. Do you know what we spend? I will tell you. According to the Economist, on April 28, we spent 2 percent of GDP on infrastructure.
A lot of people are doing columns on whether America remains No. 1 in the world, whether we have lost our clout, whether we have lost our competitiveness, whether we have lost our ability to invest in the future. This bill is a good testing ground because this measure is all infrastructure, with the ability to get it done in the future by a bank that can specialize in the arena.
So it is a good test. It seems to me, if we want this country to be No. 1, we have to vote yes. I believe the will is on this side of the aisle and I send a challenge to the other side of the aisle. There is no reason not to vote for this bill.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Cardin). The Senator from Illinois.
Mr. DURBIN. I thank the Senator from California for her presentation. As she talked about her wonderful hometown of San Francisco, one of my favorite cities outside Illinois, I thought about my most recent trip there to that Golden Gate Bridge and the wonderful work that is done in the Presidio. What a tribute it is to that beautiful part of our country that the investments are being made now so people can enjoy it. It was filled with people, bicyclers, walkers, runners, families, tourists, and everybody. It is an indication to me that if you build it, they will come.
In this situation, I couldn't help but reflect as the Senator went through the litany of all the great achievements in America over the last 60 years from the viewpoint of infrastructure. Think back to President Eisenhower and the big debate that was on then about the interstate highway system: Was it going to be bonded or paid for with taxes? It went back and forth, and it ended with a bipartisan agreement, and thank goodness it did. We need that kind of bipartisan agreement right here.
Were it not for the interstate highway system, your State would be much different today. So would mine. Thank goodness, 60 years ago, a Republican President and a Democratic Congress reached an agreement. It can be done.
The Democrats did not say if Eisenhower gets this, people are going to think better of him. They thought better of the Nation, and that was a commitment that made a difference.
I thank the Senator for telling us this story. I appreciate it.
Mr. President, we had a meeting this morning with economists from labor and business, and they came and talked to us about what is going on with the American economy. Nothing they said was a great surprise, but it sure was troubling. One-fifth of all men in America are currently out of work. Just a few years ago, it was one-twentieth.
Since 1969, there has been a 28-percent decline in purchasing power of the average working family. Even though they are working, they have fallen behind. The level of fear and anger in our country is growing. We have had slow economic growth rates, and we are facing some serious issues. The United States today has the same number of jobs it had in the year 2000, 11 years ago, but we have 30 million more Americans in 2011 than we did in the year 2000. We can lament this and read about it and say isn't it a darn shame or we can do something about it.
Fortunately, for those of us who have been elected to this Chamber, we have a reason to do something. In fact, that is the reason we have been sent here. People didn't send us to give inspiring speeches; they sent us to solve problems, to make life better for America, to make this a stronger Nation--a secure, safe, and stronger Nation. We have that power to do this, and the question is whether we will.
I can tell you many people argue that the President's efforts to get this economy moving have failed. I could not disagree more. I have been around Illinois, and I have taken a look at what we have built in America with the stimulus funds. It is impressive. In my home State, it is impressive, not only in terms of infrastructure but helping businesses get started and to succeed.
Douglas Holtz-Eakin is the president of the right-leaning American Action Forum and was Senator McCain's top economic adviser during the 2008 Presidential campaign. In the Washington Post, on Sunday, he said:
``The argument that the stimulus had zero impact and we shouldn't have done it is intellectually dishonest or wrong.''
That is from a conservative, Republican-leaning economist. He knew the stimulus helped. America would have been in a deeper hole today had we not acted to reduce taxes and to help build America in ways that will serve us for generations to come.
We know now we need to do more. Tomorrow we are going to give our colleagues in the Senate a chance to join us in making that happen. We are going to try to move this country forward by putting people to work building things that count. Highways and bridges and airports and schools, community colleges and things that will serve us for years to come. It will create thousands of jobs all across America. We know the stimulus bill did that.
The Department of Transportation estimates that $48 billion in transportation funds put 65,000 people to work on 15,000 projects. I just saw one last week. It is the new Intermodal Transportation Center in Normal, IL. It is amazing. Right next to the Amtrak station, they have built an intermodal center which has kicked off a renaissance in downtown Normal, IL. There are restaurants, a brandnew hotel I stayed in, a Marriott. There are all sorts of shops and a lot of activity. It is all focused on the centerpiece that is now under construction and will soon be completed. This intermodal center is paid for by the same stimulus funds that many come to the floor and question or mock. This multimodal center is a centerpiece for the growth of a great town in the Midwest.
Incidentally, the rail service of that Amtrak station is being funded with $1.1 billion in high-speed rail grants that were part of the stimulus as well. We didn't just build the buildings, we are putting down new rail with concrete to make sure people have a safe, secure, and faster ride. The station is built with $22 million in TIGER grant funds through the same Recovery Act.
These investments are doing great things for Normal, for Illinois State University that is there. The mayor of Bloomington, who is right next door, came over to say he agreed too.
The Peoria airport is another story. They just completed a brandnew airport terminal. It is beautiful. Mr. President, $6.4 million in Federal stimulus funds are going right into Peoria, creating jobs in Peoria, and building an airport for the 21st century. There were 120 workers at work building this terminal--good pay, good benefits, jobs right here in America.
The Englewood Flyover Project in Chicago is going to eliminate the biggest railroad bottleneck in the Midwest. It will mean that goods and passengers move more quickly through that great city and to their destination. It will put hundreds to work for this construction, and it came right out of the stimulus package.
I listened earlier when Senator Feinstein talked about choices we have to make in this country. I think the choices are pretty clear. We know what China is doing. If we go to China today, we will see building cranes in every direction. She talked about a 375-mile underground subway system. When I was there, they talked about 50 new airports they are going to build in the next 5 years that can land every Boeing aircraft. They are building the ports, the airports, the roads, and the railroads to compete with us in the 21st century. What are we doing? We are locked in a partisan debate on the Senate floor, where we cannot get one Republican vote to support the President's jobs bill to create jobs building America's economic future--not one.
Why? I will tell you why. Let's get down to brass tacks. The Republicans say we cannot vote for any bill that raises taxes. The President's jobs bill--the part we are going to bring--does raise taxes, and here are the taxes that are raised. For those making over $1 million a year in income--that is over $20,000 a week in income--we say, on the income over $1 million, they have to pay a surtax of .7 percent. That would mean that the first $100 that the millionaire makes over $1 million, they would have to pay 70 cents. The Republicans have said: No way. We will not make the millionaire pay 70 cents on the first $100 he earns over $1 million, even if it means putting people to work in America. Who disagrees with that position? A majority of Democrats, Independents, and a majority of Republicans, a majority of the tea party members disagree with the Republican position, but not a single Republican has broken ranks yet to join us in a bipartisan effort to put Americans back to work and pay for it by having the wealthiest, the most well off in our country pay 70 cents on $100.
To me, that is not too much to ask. I would ask that and more of those who have been blessed with a comfortable life and a good income and a nice home and no worries. For them to pay a little more so America can get moving forward and we can reduce this unemployment rate is not too much to ask. It is what we were sent here to do.
I encourage my colleagues to join us. Let's get together, if we can, in a bipartisan basis tomorrow and pass this portion of the jobs act and put America to work.
Incidentally, at this point, the Republicans have produced no jobs bill. They have no ideas. As we are united in fighting this recession and unemployment, they are united in opposing anything proposed by President Obama. I don't think that is the way we need to operate.
Thank goodness when President Eisenhower built the interstate system, a Republican President and Democratic Congress looked beyond the next election and into the next century and what America needed.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Wyoming is recognized.
A Second Opinion
Mr. BARRASSO. Mr. President, the October 2011 issue of the AARP bulletin contains an interesting opinion piece. It was written by the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid. It is right there on the front page, Senate Leader Reid. His opinion piece is entitled ``The Health Care Law is Already Working.''
I come to the floor, as I do from time to time, to give a doctor's second opinion. I have a second opinion today about the piece in the AARP paper. I find the choice of the words in the title, ``The Health Care Law is Already Working,'' ironic, especially as the American people continue to express negative views about President Obama's health care law.
I come to the floor--as a physician who has practiced medicine in Wyoming and taken care of Wyoming families for a quarter of a century--
to talk about the health care law and to talk about health care in America. What we see is a growing majority of Americans who want to see the entire law repealed and replaced with patient-centered reforms.
Don't take my word for it. Let's look at the facts. On October 18, 2011, just last week, the Kaiser Family Foundation released its monthly health tracking poll. This is a nonpartisan Kaiser survey and it tracks the public views about the health care law, and they have been doing it ongoing. The results this month are truly astonishing. About half of all Americans have an unfavorable view of the health care law. Overall favorability of the health care law stands at just 34 percent, an alltime low. The number of individuals who view the health care law very favorably stands at 12 percent, an alltime low. The number of people who think they will personally be better off due to the health care law stands at 18 percent, an alltime low. The number of individuals who think the country, as a whole, will be better off due to the health care law stands at just 28 percent, an alltime low. Approval of the law among Democrats dropped 13 percentage points to an alltime low. These results make it clear that the new health care law does not work.
About 19 months ago, Mr. Schumer, the senior Senator from New York, claimed on NBC's ``Meet The Press'' that:
. . . as people learn about the bill, and now that the bill is enacted, it's going to become more and more popular.
The President and Washington Democrats miscalculated. They made numerous promises to the American people and they said we need to act fast. We can answer questions later. They asked the American people to trust them. Then the Nation watched as weeks went by, new stories uncovered another health care law glitch, another health care law unintended consequence and another of the President's broken promises. Seniors all around the country know that the President's health care law took over $500 billion from a broken Medicare Program not to save Medicare but to start a whole new government spending program for someone else, not for seniors. Medicare patients know the health care law failed them and failed to address the broken physician payment system. America's seniors understand that Washington Democrats can't cut $\1/2\ trillion from Medicare and then claim those cuts will not impact their own health care.
When we look at Medicaid, Governors all across the country know the health care law's Medicaid expansion will restrict patient access to care and very likely bankrupt our States. Medicare only pays health care providers cents on the dollar. That is why about 40 percent of physicians don't accept Medicaid patients. Having a government health care card doesn't mean patients will actually have access to medical care.
We also have concerns since the law was passed about employers dropping coverage. President Obama promised that if Americans liked their current health care plan, under the law, they would be able to keep it. Over the last 19 months, employers have made it clear that the law's mandates are too expensive, threatening their own ability to offer health insurance to their employees.
A reputable national consulting firm surveyed employers across industries, geographies, and employer sizes. The company produced a report titled ``How U.S. Health Care Reform Will Affect Employees' Benefits.'' The company, McKinsey & Company, found that overall 30 percent of employers will either definitely or probably stop offering employer-sponsored coverage after 2014. That is when the President's health care law goes into full effect. Among employers with a high awareness of the health care law, understanding the specific implications of the law, that number of those who will either definitely or probably stop offering employer-sponsored coverage jumps to 50 percent. At least 30 percent of employers would actually gain economically by simply dropping coverage even if they compensate employees through other benefit offerings or higher salaries. So how did we get from ``if you like the plan you have, you can keep it'' to
``30 percent of employers will either definitely or probably stop offering health insurance''?
The problems continue to mount. Recently, on October 20, 2011, Walmart announced its decision to scale back health insurance for some part-time employees. A New York Times article explained that future part-time Walmart employees working less than 24 hours per week won't be allowed to join the company's plan. New part-time employees working between 24 and 33 hours a week won't be able to buy insurance for their spouses. The New York Times article quotes Walmart as saying that the increasing cost of health care is the reason for the change.
Now let's take a look at people's premiums. In 2009, President Obama promised that his health care plan would reduce health insurance premiums $2,500 a year for families in America. Well, the opposite has occurred. President Obama's law has forced Americans to pay more for their health care premiums. On September 27, 2011, the Kaiser Family Foundation issued a report showing that the employer average annual family premium increased 9 percent, from $13,770 to $15,073. The employer average annual single premium--the other was a family, now for singles--the single premium increased 8 percent, from $5,049 to $5,429. Of course, part of this premium increase is tied directly to the health care law.
Then let's look at the CLASS program. That program has recently failed. Remember, President Obama's health care law established a brandnew Federal long-term care entitlement program. It was referred to as CLASS, but the letters stood for ``Community Living Assistance Services and Supports.'' Well, to qualify, people would have to pay the government a monthly premium for 5 years, and then after those 5 years, they could begin collecting benefits. It is now known that the CLASS program was an intentionally designed budget gimmick. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that the CLASS program would reduce the deficit by $86 billion. These ``savings'' came from the premium dollars the CLASS program would collect for the first 5 years, all while the program wasn't required or allowed to pay out any benefits to individuals. So all the money would be coming in. Instead of holding on to that excess money being collected to pay out for future expenses, Washington Democrats here in the Senate used those funds to pay for President Obama's health care law.
Fast forward, and we now know for sure that the program is not financially viable and does not work. How do we know that? Well, many of us knew it when it was going on here on the Senate floor a few years ago, but on October 14 of this year, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius announced that the administration will not implement the CLASS program.
An op-ed she has written appeared in the Huffington Post, and it said:
. . . as a report our department is releasing today shows, we have not identified a way to make CLASS work at this time.
The Obama administration had 19 months to figure out how to implement the program, and they couldn't do it. Administration officials at the Department of Health and Human Services knew the CLASS program was unsustainable, and I believe they knew it before President Obama signed the health care law. They knew it, the administration knew it, and the administration failed in their duty to be honest with the American people and tell them.
Today, the White House still refuses to admit that the CLASS program is a colossal failure. In the middle of last month, October 17, 2011, White House spokesman Nick Papas said:
Repealing the CLASS Act isn't necessary or productive. What we should be doing is working together to address the long-term care challenges we face as a country.
How can the White House admit that this part of the health care spending law will burden taxpayers with yet another unsustainable entitlement program and at the same time demand that it stay on the books? How do they do that?
After having received the AARP bulletin with the headline ``The Health Care Law Is Already Working'' from the Senate majority leader, I came to the conclusion that I needed to come to the floor with a second opinion. The health care law needs to be repealed. It must be replaced with reasonable, commonsense, and financially sound alternatives. This health care law is not working. It is not good for patients; it is not good for providers, the doctors and the nurses who take care of those patients; and it is not good for the American taxpayers.
I will continue to come to the floor of the Senate as we learn more and more about this health care law. It seems that just about every week or so there is a new, unintended consequence that comes forward, a new concern for patients, a new concern for providers, a new concern for the taxpayers. I will continue to work with my patients and with my colleagues to find a health care law that gets patients the care they need from the doctor they want at a price they can afford.
Thank you, Mr. President. I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Merkley). The Senator from Minnesota.
Ms. KLOBUCHAR. Mr. President, I am here today to discuss the critical need to address our Nation's crumbling transportation and infrastructure system. The cracks in this system became abundantly clear to all of our country and, in fact, the entire world when, on the afternoon of August 1, 2007, the I-35W bridge in Minneapolis collapsed into the middle of the Mississippi River, taking the lives of 13 Minnesotans and injuring so many more.
As I said that day, a bridge just shouldn't fall down in the middle of America, especially not an eight-lane interstate highway which is one of the most heavily traveled bridges in our State, especially not at rush hour in the middle of a metropolitan area, especially not a bridge six blocks from my house that I take my family over all the time to go visit their friends. That is what happened on that day, in the middle of a sunny day in the middle of America. Yet, years after that bridge collapsed and then was rebuilt, 25 percent of our Nation's bridges are still structurally deficient or obsolete.
I wish I could say the bridge collapse was the only tragedy my State has suffered because of a broken infrastructure system. It is not. We saw another one just this October in Goodhue County on Highway 52, which connects the Twin Cities with Rochester, home to the Mayo Clinic. Within a 10-day span, one intersection on Highway 52 between Rochester, MN, and the Twin Cities of Minnesota was the site of two fatal crashes that claimed three lives and injured others. Even before these tragic crashes, everyone agreed that an interchange was needed so that drivers weren't forced to risk racing across a four-lane, divided highway, but the county and the Minnesota Department of Transportation didn't have the funds to build an interchange which could have eased the situation and could have saved lives. The worst part is that intersection of Highway 52 isn't even the most dangerous stretch of that road. In fact, local leaders have marked other projects as higher priorities. Yet the funds aren't there, the money isn't there to address these problems.
These are just two examples of the impact of our infrastructure and transportation needs in this country. There are tens of thousands more in small towns and big cities from Maryland to Minnesota. That is why I have come to the floor to discuss the Rebuild America Jobs Act, legislation I introduced with several of my colleagues, including Senator Manchin of West Virginia and Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island. We have come together as Senators from all corners of the country because we recognize the urgent need for new and bold initiatives to rebuild America.
Our legislation would get the ball rolling on desperately needed improvements by establishing an infrastructure bank--something that has long garnered bipartisan support in the Congress--and directing $50 billion toward infrastructure. Both of these ideas, as I have noted, have enjoyed bipartisan support in the past. In fact, standing there with us this afternoon was Ray LaHood, a former Republican Congressman who is now the Secretary of Transportation under a Democratic President.
We have also said there is no such thing as a Democratic bridge or a Republican bridge or a Democratic or Republican highway. Transportation has always been a bipartisan issue in this country, and it must continue to be. That is why we are continuing to push this legislation. We may not pass it this week, but I know from my colleagues on the other side of the aisle that there continues to be interest in moving ahead on infrastructure funding.
This legislation is about improving public safety so that no bridge ever collapses again in the middle of America, but it is also about creating better opportunities for our businesses and jobs. I say that because if we look back through history, it is clear that many of the major milestones that contributed to America's greatness were rooted in our infrastructure. Whether it was connecting the east and west coasts by rail in 1869 or the WPA in the 1930s or the construction of the Interstate Highway System that began in the 1950s with a Democratic Congress and a Republican President--Dwight Eisenhower--or even the amazing innovations of the early American auto industry, our country did not move forward because our leaders tinkered at the edges of the status quo. America flourished because of innovators such as Henry Ford, who once said: ``If I'd asked my customers what they wanted, they'd have said a faster horse.'' Then he turned around and built the Model T.
If Henry Ford were alive today, he would say that America cannot afford to take a horse-and-buggy approach to infrastructure. That is, in fact, what we have been doing. While other countries are moving full steam ahead with infrastructure investments, we are simply treading water.
In an increasingly competitive global economy, standing still is, sadly, falling behind.
China and India are spending about 9 and 5 percent respectively of their GDP on infrastructure. Even Europe spends 5 percent of its GDP. Yet how much are we committing right now? About 2 percent. The effects of this shortsighted strategy are increasingly clear. In its 2007 and 2008 report, the World Economic Forum ranked American infrastructure sixth in the world. That was only a few years ago, and yet we have already slipped to 16th place, putting our roads roughly on par with those of Malaysia and far behind those of Germany, Canada, and Hong Kong. This is a huge problem because the strength of our infrastructure is directly tied to the competitiveness of our economy. Just look at the numbers. As our country slipped in the rankings for infrastructure, we also dropped in the World Economic Forum's rankings on competitiveness. Last year we were in fourth place, and this year we are in fifth place.
Competitiveness is a huge element here, but it is not just about global bragging rights. Fundamentally, it is about lifting the parking brake that has kept our economy idling and addressing the major inefficiencies we have seen in our infrastructure system.
If we want to move to this next-century economy, it is going to be about exports. It is going to be about making stuff again, inventing things, exporting to the world. If we do not have the roads to carry the trucks to bring those goods to market or the waterways and the barges to do it or an air traffic control system that is up to speed on a competitive basis internationally, we are not going to be that economy that so many of our workers and so many of our businesses want us to be.
Failing to move ahead will have consequences no one likes. For example, it would not be altogether different from levying a multibillion-dollar tax on American industry. I say that because inefficiencies in infrastructure are expected to drive up the cost of doing business by an estimated $430 billion, according to the American Society of Civil Engineers. That is just in the next decade.
America spends 4.8 billion hours in traffic--just sitting there in traffic--every single year. When trucks idle in traffic on the highways or wait at port facilities to be loaded and unloaded or when freight trains sit waiting to pass in our congested rail network, our economy hemorrhages dollars, losing roughly $200 billion each year. To put that number in perspective, it is roughly 1.5 percent of our gross domestic product.
Increased transportation costs will make it more expensive for companies to ship goods and purchase raw materials. We can only expect that those costs would be passed on to customers.
Traffic congestion, as I mentioned, costs us billions. When I said 4.8 billion hours per year, actually, I thought: Did I get that wrong? Is it millions? But, no, it is, in fact, 4.8 billion hours each year stuck in traffic. That is $101 billion in lost revenue. That is $713 per motorist.
The bad news is that without action those numbers are only going in one direction--up. By 2020, it is estimated that our crumbling infrastructure will cost our economy more than 876,000 jobs and $897 billion in lost GDP growth.
As I alluded to earlier, the public safety aspect of this debate is also incredibly important, and it is something we cannot afford to ignore, particularly in the context of population growth. According to the Census Bureau, the American population is expected to add another 120 million people by 2050. That is a 40-percent increase in 40 years, and it is like adding the entire nation of Japan or more than three States of California. Think about that. We cannot stand still on our infrastructure. That is 120 million more people on our roads, bridges, tunnels, highways, and airports--structures that are already insufficient for meeting the needs of today's population.
But here is the good news. Addressing this challenge does not just make sense from a long-term competitiveness perspective, it also makes sense because it would be an immediate shot in the arm for our economy. We are still looking at an environment where too many Americans are out of work or have seen their hours cut back. And people who have taken it the hardest are people in the construction industry. In construction, the unemployment rate now is 13.3 percent--more than 4 points higher than the national average.
The Rebuild America Act will help get these workers back on the job. Here is how we do it:
First of all, we will need to make smarter decisions to stretch our transportation dollars further. This is a compelling case for public-
private partnerships--we all know government cannot do this alone--
public-private partnerships for private sector jobs. That is why the infrastructure bank part of the Rebuild America Jobs Act is so important. The American Infrastructure Financing Authority would provide loans and loan guarantees to finance projects that would otherwise be too expensive for any one city, county, or even a State to accomplish on its own. The bank would serve as an incentive for the creation of public-private partnerships and the mechanisms necessary for repaying loans once the projects are completed. This will help ensure the quality of projects too, because no private firm is going to invest in a project that is likely to fail.
The infrastructure bank would allow State transportation departments to move more projects off the books and to tackle other critical needs. So the Minnesota Department of Transportation could finally have the resources to focus on fixing Highway 52 and Goodhue County Road 9--or projects in Missouri or projects in Maryland or projects in Oregon. There are needs all over this country.
I wish to make an important point here that the American taxpayers need to know; that is, they would be protected as well. Projects would be considered and reviewed by expert staff, separate from the independent and nonpartisan board that would select the projects. There are strong oversight protections, and projects would have to be backed by a dedicated revenue stream.
All of this is part of the reason this infrastructure bank has always had bipartisan support. Senator Kerry has worked very hard on this legislation, as have many of my Republican colleagues. They have suggested a similar model in the BUILD Act, many of the sponsors. The BUILD Act has 10 bipartisan cosponsors.
Beyond bipartisan congressional support, an infrastructure bank has earned the support of people as far-ranging as from the chamber of commerce to the AFL-CIO.
With the initial infusion of $10 billion that the Rebuild America Act proposes, it is estimated it could leverage private investment to generate between $300 billion and $600 billion for infrastructure improvements. The infrastructure bank is the kind of bold and new action we should be taking as a nation.
Coming from a State, as I do, where there is a large rural population, I also think it is important to note that rural America--
whether they are in South Dakota, North Dakota, Montana, or Nevada--
should not be left behind. The infrastructure bank would be structured so that the kinds of projects that are important to rural regions, such as clean drinking water and sanitary sewer systems, could also compete for loans and loan guarantees.
Right now, too many repair and replacement projects in our Nation's drinking water and sanitary sewer systems are endangered by a lack of funding. According to the 2008 EPA survey of needs, Minnesota needs
$4.1 billion to upgrade our drinking and sanitary water systems. And in 2011 alone, my State has $400 million worth of projects that are just sitting there.
Clean water projects are vital to the safety and health of our communities, particularly our rural communities. We all benefit from projects that can promote public health, protect our environment, help create jobs, and support local infrastructure. Let me give you an example. In southwestern Minnesota, we are working on a three-State effort--consisting of Iowa, South Dakota, and Minnesota--to get water to 20 communities. The region's current lack of water has brought economic development to a standstill in an area where there are all kinds of possibilities for development in an agricultural community. According to the manager of the Lincoln Pipestone Rural Water System in Minnesota, this lack of clean water has forced the community to turn away businesses that would have otherwise opened in the area, including a large dairy plant, a large cattle-feeding operation, and biofuels plants. That is just in the last 5 years. In other words, the community has lost untold jobs and economic growth because it lacks the water.
Importantly, the infrastructure bank that the Rebuild America Jobs Act would create also includes technical assistance to rural communities. Five percent of the initial investment to capitalize the bank would be designated for projects in these very areas. That is $500 million for rural America.
As we move forward with this conversation, we cannot lose sight of the critical importance of the multiyear surface transportation bill. This is something we need, and we need it now.
The surface transportation bill gives certainty to State departments of transportation so they can make the multiyear planning decisions on how best to spend Federal and State resources.
The certainty of a multiyear bill also benefits the private sector. Once States know how much they can put toward infrastructure projects, they can begin contracting with companies--private companies--in engineering, design, and construction. These are companies such as Caterpillar, which employs 750 people at its road-paving equipment manufacturing facility in Minnesota. I visited there in August. Caterpillar's employees are the kind of people who are out there on the front lines of American industry. They are people who make the slogan
``Made in America'' not just a slogan; it is real. They depend on the certainty that only a multiyear Transportation bill provides. We have an opportunity to give them that certainty.
I know Chairman Boxer and Senator Inhofe have been working on this out of their committee, but I did want to keep in mind that as we work on the rebuild America jobs bill, as we work on the Transportation bill we are talking about today that I would like to get passed by the end of this year, that we also are cognizant of the fact that there is a very important 2-year bill they are debating at this very moment.
When we look at the state of our Nation's infrastructure, there is no escaping the fact that we are far from where we need to be. Our 21st-
century economy depends on a 21st-century transportation network. It is that simple. Fixing our infrastructure is one of the best possible ways to strengthen our Nation's most basic foundation--the channels we use for everything from commerce and exporting to emergency management and disaster response.
But I also believe it is about bringing America back to the brass tacks. We know we have to do something about our debt, and I personally believe we can get there with a balanced approach, with spending cuts and looking at closing some of these loopholes. But even then, we must focus on what will move our economy forward in the long term. We simply can no longer base our economy on being a country that just simply churns money and shuffles paper, simply being a country that consumes, that imports and spends its way to a huge trade deficit. That has not worked.
What we need to be now is a country that makes things again, that invents things, that exports to the world. The only way we are going to make that happen is if we have the roads and the bridges and the rail and the barges and the airports to carry these goods to market. That is what this is about. We cannot put it off any longer. We must move forward now in a bipartisan manner to get this done for our country.
I urge my colleagues to support this bill.
Thank you very much, Mr. President. I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Missouri.
Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, I rise today to speak on this infrastructure jobs bill, and actually I think my good friend from Minnesota has done a great job of explaining why we need to be focused on infrastructure. I think if I was going to summarize my comments, as they might compare with hers, they would be that we need to be focused on the longer term problem.
We certainly do have a committee that is working on a 2-year bill, and here we are spending time today talking about a bill that I think is likely not to happen. Even if it did happen, would it be better than a 2-year bill? Of course not. Does it do anything better than the traditional infrastructure focus of the country that includes communities and cities and States instead of Federal bureaucrats? Of course it does not. We need to be focused on the right thing, at the right time.
The top concern on American minds today is righting our Nation's economy, having an economy that creates private sector jobs. While we take different approaches to addressing this issue, I think the Congress is genuinely united in understanding what the goal should be; we just have such a difference of opinion as to how to get there.
What role does infrastructure play in private sector job creation and competition? It plays a critical role. In fact, it is one of the few places where the Federal Government actually can take actions that specifically create private sector jobs.
Roads and bridges are maintained and kept clean and kept open and supervised by State and local authorities, but they are built by private sector contractors. So that is a good thing. The question is, What is the best way to get there? Unfortunately, we are 2 years removed from the expiration of the last surface transportation bill, and we are talking in the Transportation Committee--I am told; I am not on that committee--I know Chairman Boxer and the ranking Republican, Mr. Inhofe, are talking about how you can have another 2-year extension of that bill. It is unfortunate we are not talking about the 4- or 5- or 6-year surface transportation bill we have traditionally talked about because that is the kind of time it takes to really make a project that matters work.
We have been holding the surface transportation bill together with duct tape and Super Glue for a couple of years now, and the last time we did this, in September, we extended that bill for 6 months. The President frankly began to put his energy behind this different proposal that I have lots of concerns about. But I have even greater concerns about the fact that the energy and focus is there instead of on how do we get at least a 2-year extension of a transportation bill, a surface transportation bill that would work.
I said we were holding the bill together--the legislation together--
by duct tape and Super Glue. Unfortunately, that is how we are also holding the transportation system together, because you cannot have the Eisenhower vision that was mentioned earlier of an interstate system, you cannot have an Eisenhower vision that has a 6-month shelf life or a 6-month window of opportunity. If you are going to have that kind of system put in place, you have to have a system that is put in place with an understanding that this is an ongoing program, that we have ongoing sources of funding, that we have an ongoing ability to contract.
That is why we need to be talking about the best way to find new and innovative ideas to invest in our infrastructure development. I am increasingly concerned that this legislation we are talking about today takes a short-term ``Federal bureaucrat knows best'' approach, rather than the approach we have had good success with in the country when we were building roads and bridges and airports and infrastructure in ways that mattered.
In all of our home States, certainly in my home State of Missouri, community leaders and job creators tell me that they are clearly looking for more certainty of how to create jobs. They need the ability to look beyond 3 or 6 months in order to plan and anticipate investment levels to expand their operations. We need to make smart investments in our Nation's infrastructure so people who build infrastructure can look forward with certainty, and communities that are dependent on infrastructure can look forward with certainty, and a business that is thinking about making a job-expanding commitment to a community knows what the highway plan is for the decade, not for the next day.
We have to get there, and you cannot get there 6 months at a time. This piecemeal approach, including the continuing resolution, and the so-called stimulus bill, and other things that postpone other efforts for communities to get funding, the whole idea of an infrastructure bank that would go for projects that had some ability to pay for themselves--when you ask questions about that, nobody knows what that means. Nobody knows why. If these things have an ability to pay for themselves, States could bond them out tomorrow. If you have a revenue stream that will pay off the building of a bridge, if you figured out how to create that revenue stream, States could issue that bond right now.
The only reason to have a Federal infrastructure bank is because the infrastructure bank is insolvent and not planned to be solvent, and only the Federal Government can give it the credibility it needs so it can ever possibly be used. But that is not the long-term solution to infrastructure.
As we have witnessed in recent months, the President's idea of a jobs plan apparently is focused on holding press conferences in front of bridges--he had one today--to sell the idea that another stimulus bill will create more jobs. How does the President ever expect shovel-ready projects to be shovel ready? They only get to be shovel ready if you have a lot of time to plan and you know what the funding source is, and you know how you are going to not just start the project but complete the project--bridge replacement and major infrastructure investment and critical projects.
But if this bill does become law, 10 percent of the money, the Congressional Budget Office estimates, would be spent between now and September 30 of next year. So this is no economic recovery plan. It is also no long-term highway plan. And 10 percent of the money spent in the next 11 months is not what it takes to get this job done.
Of course, 50 percent of that--of all of the money--would be spent by the Federal highway department rather than allocated, as we have allocated Federal highway money since the 1950s, back to the States with incentives for them to match that money and to do the best they could to have a fair distribution of highway and surface transportation money across the country.
These piecemeal solutions will not work. There are many examples of communities that are facing challenges and they want to know how that question is going to be met. In Washington, MO--not Washington, DC, but Washington, MO--there is an 80-year-old bridge that goes across the Missouri River. It needs to be replaced. It has needed to be replaced for some time now. But are we going to let the President of the United States decide if that is the bridge we replace? There are some things that the President should not decide. The President is without any question in the best position to decide what is the best way to go into Abbottabad and get Osama bin Laden. The President is not in the best position to decide what are the bridges to be built between Kentucky and Ohio.
I know he likes to give that example a lot because the Republican Senate leader is from Kentucky and the Republican Speaker of the House is from Ohio. And he says, we need a bridge between Ohio and Kentucky. That may actually be true. But the President of the United States is not the best person to solve that problem. The best people to solve that problem are the people in Kentucky and Ohio who get their gas tax money, their transportation money, whatever kind of funding we can figure out meets the needs of the future and say, here is our 10-year plan. Here is how we are going to fund our 10-year plan. In year one we are going to do the bridge planning for which of these bridge possibilities we need. In year two we are going to plan the bridge we decided we needed. In year three we are going to build the bridge. Maybe by year six or seven someone is using the bridge. This is the idea. These ideas, these short-term solutions, simply do not work.
State departments of transportation are hesitant to commit to long-
term projects without the assurances of a funding stream in the future. The President's bus tour will not provide individuals with more certainty, but instead a long-term investment plan would work to answer these questions. We need a clear Federal infrastructure blueprint to help county commissioners, to help contractors and cities, to help statewide departments of transportation lay the groundwork to plan, to assess local needs, to hire more employees, to make the decisions necessary to encourage economic growth.
In addition to the short-term approach that I think this bill has, I am concerned with some of the policies included in this proposal. With the increased funding for discretionary proposals, grant programs such as the Federal TIGER grants and now the infrastructure bank, the message being sent to the States is that Washington bureaucrats will set the priorities. Our entire infrastructure network is in desperate need of comprehensive updating that refuses to be put off any longer. We need to refocus all our efforts on the modes of transportation, the flexibility between them. Why we continue to rely on fragmented programs makes no sense to me or lots of other people. The answer is not to continue writing blank checks to the administration and then hoping that the people who will make the decision--with zero accountability, frankly--will somehow make that in the best interests of all of our States. We need to do the hard work of crafting and investing in a formula that works for the future.
Chairman Boxer and Ranking Member Inhofe have been working hard putting together a new reauthorization bill. I wish that were a 6-year bill, not a 2-year bill. But I tell you, a 2-year bill has far greater possibilities for success than a 6-month bill that will go away before it is able to do any good.
I look forward to starting the work. I hope we can stop taking time on things that will not work and start solving the problems that have to be solved for the country, that have private sector job recovery that we need to be prepared for the next century, as people in this body worked in the 1950s to see that we could be prepared for the last 50 years of the last century.
I suggest the absence of a quorum.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
The assistant editor of the Daily Digest proceeded to call the roll.
Mr. GRASSLEY. I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
Mr. GRASSLEY. Mr. President, most every Republican in this body and probably outside of this body would admit that President Obama inherited a very bad economy by the time he was sworn in. The only thing is, by every measure of the economy, this economy is much worse now than what he inherited.
The Obama economy is bad because there is a prospect of taking more money from the American taxpayers with the biggest tax increase in the history of the country next year; and many brand new regulations that are very costly to the economy. Particularly small businesses do not know where they are going to be hit next and where their costs will be.
We have this big budget deficit that is a damper on the economy. In every respect, things this administration are doing are putting a wet blanket on the economy. We have wrongheaded energy policies as well.
We hear the President say, when he puts forth his jobs bill, touring the country in his bus: Pass this bill right now. Pass this bill right now. We have had some experience with efforts to pass bills ``right now.'' They got passed, like the stimulus bill, 1 month after he was sworn in, which was supposed to keep unemployment under 8 percent. But it has never been under 8 percent since 1 month after that time. We have to pass the health care reform bill ``right now.'' And the health care reform bill was passed that very first year when the other party controlled everything, all three political branches of government. They had everything their way. And it was passed ``right now.''
We are finding out that passing something right now is not the way to do business, particularly if it is done in a partisan way. I think the extent to which the President would lead instead of being on the fringe would help this process along, because he is the only elected official in this country who speaks for the national voice. Each one of us representing our constituencies has a national perspective, but we also have to be worried about the needs of our constituents.
Let's go to what the latest effort is of this President to turn this economy around his way and get this bill passed ``right now.''
Just a few weeks ago, the Senate considered a so-called jobs bill that would have provided $35 billion of the $447 billion for the purpose of creating or saving jobs for teachers and policemen and firefighters. This bailout was included by President Obama in this $447 billion stimulus bill No. 2 that he proposed in his speech before Congress this September.
When it became apparent the Senate leadership didn't have the necessary votes for the whole package, then Majority Leader Reid chose to move this bill in parts instead of in one big package. Most of the reason he had to do that is because people in his caucus were not ready to vote for big tax increases or taking more money away from the American people and sending it to Washington.
Proponents of that bill argued that this $35 billion bailout was necessary to prevent the layoff of teachers and public safety employees. Don't forget, this isn't the first time the Senate has considered this type of bailout because it was that bailout that just had to pass ``right now,'' in February of 2009, which was supposed to keep employment under 8 percent. That was the $814 billion stimulus bill Congress enacted in early 2009. It included bailout money for State and local governments.
That is one of the reasons it didn't work, because whether it is the State, local, or Federal government, governments consume wealth. They don't create wealth. When we put half of that $814 billion bill into public employment, it doesn't create jobs. That money should have been used to stimulate private sector employment.
President Obama stated that bill would save or create up to 4 million jobs over the following 2 years. That bill was supposed to create or save 150,000 jobs for teachers, nurses, firefighters, and police officers according to our President.
Then, in August 2010 Congress passed another State and local bailout, this time sending $26 billion to States to save or create public sector jobs. At that time, Robert Gibbs, the White House spokesman, stated that this bill was ``a very important proposal, particularly to ensure that 160,000-plus teachers don't get fired as a result of bad State budgets.'' This $26 billion was the second effort by Congress to help States plug their budget holes while claiming that we were saving the jobs of teachers and other government workers.
The truth is, these efforts to save State and local public sector jobs are more simply a bailout of State and local governments that have failed to rein in their own spending. State and local governments became addicted to tax-and-spend big government policies, and Federal bailouts have only aided the addiction.
Rather than making the necessary and difficult budget decisions, these State and local governments come to rely on the spendthrift behavior of their Congress to spend more and plug budget holes. Nationally, the debt held by States is approaching $3 trillion. That doesn't even figure in unfunded pension liabilities. Some of the States in the worst trouble are Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Illinois, and California. The increase in debt has had a significant impact on their budgets or on their bond rates and their ability to find competitive bond rates and competitive financing.
The free-spending State legislatures, coupled with a huge public work force, have driven up the cost of doing business in these States. It has negatively impacted their unemployment rate and their economic growth.
For much of the history of our country, States have been responsible for financing their schools, police, firefighters, first responders, and other public employment. We know that throughout the 224-year history of our country most of the time these State and local governments have done a pretty darn good job. States that have done well have grown economically and attracted more jobs. With economic growth we are going to have more taxpayers. What this country needs is more taxpayers, not more taxes.
States that haven't managed their budgets well have had, as you might expect, the opposite result. This competition among States has created a system that demands and rewards good government and, in the process, attracts employers and workers.
A Federal bailout of States upsets this balance. It rewards bad behavior and ultimately hurts the American economy. Federal bailouts eliminate the risks associated with poor economic policies. The moral hazard of Federal bailouts is that it sends a message to bad actors that there are no negative consequences for their failure to effectively govern.
At the same time, this type of Federal stimulus is ineffective at saving or creating jobs, and it does nothing to promote private sector growth. Annual Federal deficits are close to about 8 to 9 percent of GDP, and our national debt is $15 trillion. We cannot afford to bail out States and continue to encourage poor fiscal behavior by our States.
The bailout of Democratic Governors and State legislatures--and I suppose I ought to include Republican Governors and Republican State legislatures, as well--and public employees may be good politics, but it is terrible economics and creates even worse fiscal situations. Rather than propose political solutions during this economic downturn, the President should work with Congress to find real, authentic, genuine solutions to our economic and unemployment problems.
The recession began in December 2007, and nearly 1 in 10 Americans remain unemployed today. More than 26 million Americans are either unemployed or underemployed. The policies of the past 2\1/2\ years have not worked; they have made things worse.
Now, for the benefit of people--and maybe we can't say this too often because it looks strictly partisan--but we all ought to admit that this President inherited a bad economic situation. It is nothing to be proud of for a Republican President or any of us Republicans who were in office at that time. But by any measure of the economy, this President has made things worse.
The time for political documents has long past. It is time to govern, to work together, to get our economy growing again, and move the Obama economy into a bipartisan economy, at least to job creation.
For those who are unemployed, it is a depression. It is time we did something to help turn this situation around. Private sector employers need an international trade agenda that opens new doors to sell U.S. agricultural goods and manufactured products and services. Obviously, I am glad the President finally sent to the Senate three trade agreements and that they were passed last month. They were delayed, though, unnecessarily for years, and the rest of the world is moving ahead without us. We are more than capable of increasing exports, but we need the markets to do it. It is very simple. Why worry about exports? Because only 4 percent of the people on the face of the Earth live in the United States. The other 96 percent live outside the United States. Who are we going to market to, the 4 percent? Yes. But if we are going to expand our economy, we are going to have to market to the other 96 percent.
Thank God, President Obama has set an agenda that he wants to double exports. But in order to reach this goal and do everything possible to generate economic activity and opportunity in the United States, the President needs to move forward on other job-generating and trading initiatives without delay.
It is time to put an end to job-killing Federal regulations--as I move on to a new subject of why the economy is not so good. New regulations from EPA, the Department of Labor, National Labor Relations Board, and others are making it harder for businesses to grow. Understand that I said ``new'' regulations. I think sometimes people, when they hear us talk about a moratorium on regulations, they think we ought to take all of the present regulations off the books. They may not necessarily be good, but the economy has accounted for them already.
When we have 9.1 percent unemployment, and we have all these new regulations coming out--66,000 pages of new regulations so far just this year--that just makes it very hard to decide whether we ought to hire somebody--particularly, for small business.
Remember, small business creates 70 percent of the new jobs and about 25 percent of all employment in America. In some cases, new regulations are actually destroying jobs. With unemployment at 9.1 percent, it is time for the Federal bureaucracy to stop harmful, job-killing, new regulations.
What we are calling for is not to stop ever regulating into the future, but to put a short-term moratorium on regulations so that people have a chance to get us out of the hole we are in with this 9.1 percent unemployment--let's say a measure of getting unemployment down to 7 percent before we have new regulations.
It is also time to develop domestic energy resources that will create jobs while increasing domestic energy supplies. Nobody seems to be very concerned about spending $830 million every day--just in case that sounds phenomenal, $830 million a day is the amount of money we send overseas to bring oil into this country. That is a terrible subsidy to the volatile Middle East, which wants to train Americans to kill us or to reward Hugo Chavez, who badmouths us almost every day.
We need to make more energy available, driving down prices, making our country more energy independent. The President's energy agenda is moving us backward because of not enough emphasis on the fossil fuels that are available in this country. It was only 3 years ago that natural gas was $14, $15 per unit because we thought we were using it all up in America. Recent discoveries tell us that we have natural gas for maybe 100 years. It is down to around $4 or $5 now per unit.
But it is not a case of finding fault with the President on green energy because whatever source of energy we have, if we want a growing economy, we are obviously going to use more energy. We just must use it more conservatively. We ought to encourage conservation, and we should also encourage the use of fossil fuels wherever it can be found. It ought to encourage all sorts of green energy, and that is all the biofuels we in the Midwest talk about--the wind energy that my State is second in production of, and it is also solar, biomass, cellulosic, biofuels, all of the above.
I said conservation, and I guess the fourth one would be nuclear energy. It is time to change course and develop energy sources at home and create jobs in the process.
Finally, in 2009, President Obama said we don't raise taxes in a recession. He stated his position clearly: The last thing you would want to do is raise taxes on anyone during a recession because it would harm businesses and economic growth. We know when he said that unemployment was under 8 percent. So if we have 9.1 percent unemployment now and will for quite a bit into the future, aren't we still in a recession? So isn't the President's own benchmark the benchmark we ought to be using yet today? Yet we have the biggest tax increase in the history of the country--taking more money away from the taxpayers and sending it to Washington--coming up next year.
Wouldn't it do a great deal of economic good if this President said exactly what he said about the time he was sworn in; that we shouldn't increase taxes during a recession. Yet we have all these jobs packages put before the Senate that include job-killing tax hikes. That is why they have been received with bipartisan opposition. To those who say the packages the President has proposed have been killed by Republicans, one of the reasons the majority leader had to change the President's tax packages for a vote here a couple weeks ago is because there is opposition within his own conference about that. A few courageous Senate Democrats have consistently said no to their leadership when it comes to raising taxes on small business and other job creators.
The only bipartisanship we have seen so far is the bipartisan opposition to ill-conceived political documents. The Democratic majority needs to get serious about addressing our economic problems. It is time to consider policies that will get people back to work without harming the economy. It is time to stop the political aspects of this debate. The best way to do that, it seems to me, is to look at the other body--controlled by Republicans--
that has passed 15 pieces of legislation that will help turn this economy around. We haven't taken up any of them, although I think we are about ready to take up, thank God, one of the 15 that is referred to as the ``3-percent withholding.'' Unemployed Americans need to know we are going to do something to help create jobs and grow the economy, and taking up more of those 15 bills would be getting something done in a bipartisan way. Unfortunately, so far the Democratic majority and President Obama are more interested in political strategies than creating jobs and economic growth. The only reason I say that is it seems to me there is little intellectual honesty on the part of the President when in a speech given to a joint session of Congress one evening--as he did in September--he would plead for bipartisan support and then, the very next day, go out on the road on a political venture and say he can't get the cooperation of the Republicans--pass that bill right now.
I yield the floor, and I suggest the absence of a quorum.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
The bill clerk proceeded to call the roll.
Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, later this week--I assume sometime tomorrow--the Senate is expected to vote on the Rebuild America Jobs Act. This is a practical, commonsense piece of legislation that does two urgent and important things: It will help to modernize America's crumbling infrastructure, and it will help to put Americans back to work and get our economy going again.
Not surprisingly, this bill enjoys overwhelming popular support among the American people. Every day, Americans see the infrastructure crisis with their own eyes. They see interstate highways increasingly overwhelmed--potholes everywhere. They see bridges and overpasses that are structurally unsound and in danger of collapse. Need I mention the gridlock in some of our major cities because of inadequate roadways and access points for automobiles? China and Brazil are building world-
class seaports, while ours are left over from early in the last century.
We know we need to make major Federal investments in modernizing America's infrastructure, so why not do it now, at a time when our Nation is suffering from the most protracted period of joblessness since the Great Depression. The construction sector is the hardest hit part of our economy. We can put those people back to work renewing our infrastructure and, again, as I said, boosting our economy.
Why aren't we doing this? The answer is, Republicans have made it clear they intend to block this legislation tomorrow, just as they have blocked so many other bills designed to put Americans back to work and get the economy moving again. They filibustered and killed the American Jobs Act. Two weeks ago, they filibustered and killed the Teachers and First Responders Back to Work Act. It seems to me if the word ``no'' were removed from the English language, our Republican friends would be rendered speechless.
Let me state the obvious. The word ``no'' will not put 28 million Americans back to work. The word ``no'' will not allow us to strike a balanced agreement to bring deficits under control. The word ``no'' will not allow us to undertake a robust program to modernize our transportation system.
The job-creating investments in this bill are fully paid for with a tiny fractional tax on the richest of the rich in the United States. These wealthy Americans would pay a 0.7-percent surtax on incomes in excess of $1 million a year. Let me repeat that. This infrastructure jobs bill we will be voting on tomorrow, which the Republicans have indicated they are going to filibuster and kill, is fully paid for with a 0.7-percent surtax on incomes in excess of $1 million a year. If those making more than $1 million a year even noticed such a negligible tax, I would be astonished. Still, the Republicans say no.
Let's put this in context. Just last week, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office reported that over the last three decades the aftertax income of millionaires and billionaires increased by 275 percent. That is correct. The Congressional Budget Office said over the last three decades the aftertax income of millionaires and billionaires increased 275 percent. During the same 30 years--the same three decades--the average take-home pay of middle-class workers in America actually declined. So is it any wonder the middle class is upset when they see what has happened to them over the last 30 years--flat, slightly declined in terms of their living standards and their income--
while the superrich increased their take-home by 275 percent.
The top 1 percent of income earners in America now take home more than half of all the money earned each year in America. Again, that needs repeating. The top 1 percent of income earners in America take home over half of all the money earned in America every year. Mind-
boggling, isn't it? Mind-boggling. Yet Republicans adamantly oppose any tax increase on these people--even 0.7 percent--which would go toward the infrastructure of America and putting people back to work.
Certainly, no one questions the solicitude of Republicans toward the rich and the superrich. I just wish they would show even a fraction of that concern on behalf of the besieged middle class in this country. Republicans on this so-called supercommittee are willing to block all progress in order to prevent any tax increase at all on the rich, but they are demanding--demanding--deep cuts to Social Security, Medicare, student loans, and other Federal programs that undergird the middle class in the United States. Meanwhile, Republicans in the Senate continue to block the bills we have proposed in order to put people back to work and get the economy moving again.
Some pundits have speculated that, for political reasons, Republicans are deliberately blocking any legislation that would boost the economy or create jobs because that would make President Obama maybe look good. These pundits point out the Senate's minority leader has been explicit in stating that his No. 1 priority is to prevent the reelection of President Obama. So many of the pundits say that, to the extent Republicans can prevent us from doing anything--keep this place in gridlock, keep us from having a jobs program--and the economy gets worse, then they will say to the American people: See, President Obama is not doing his job. The economy is getting worse.
I just heard my colleague from Iowa. In his speech, he was at least honest enough to say President Obama had inherited a bad economy. That is true. He admitted that. My friend from Iowa, my colleague, went on to say, however, that President Obama has made it worse; that he hasn't improved anything over the last 2\1/2\ years; that his plan hasn't worked.
I daresay it is the Republicans who have been blocking anything we could do to put America back to work, including their voting no tomorrow, which I understand they will, in order to prevent us from getting this infrastructure and jobs bill through.
A more charitable explanation is Republican ideology is simply that government can't create jobs. This may be a sincere belief of most Republicans, but I must point out it is sincerely wrong. Across our Nation's history, an often visionary Federal Government has funded and spearheaded initiatives that have expanded private commerce, given birth to countless inventions and new industries and created tens of millions of jobs in the process.
Let's take a look at history. One of the most visionary advocates of Federal investment to create jobs was, believe it or not, the father of the Republican Party--Abraham Lincoln. Despite the disruption of the Civil War, Lincoln insisted on moving the Nation forward through bold Federal investments and initiatives. For example, in 1862, he signed the Pacific Railway Act, authorizing huge Federal land grants to finance construction of the transcontinental railroad--one of the great technological feats of the 19th century. To produce the rails for this railroad, he enacted a steep tariff on foreign steel in order to get the American steel industry going.
There is a story--I don't know if it is real or apocryphal--about Abraham Lincoln. He was approached by, I guess, the free traders of his time who said: If you are going to build this transcontinental railroad, it would be cheaper to import the rails from England. They have the steel mills, they know how to do it, and it would be cheaper to build them in England and ship them here. It is said Lincoln thought about this for some time and came back and said: Well, it seems to me, however, if we buy the rails from England, they have our money and we have the rails. But if we build the rails here, we have our money here and we have the rails.
As I said, I don't know if that story is true, but I have heard it many times in my lifetime. Thus, he put in place a steep tariff, kept England's rails out, rebuilt our steel industry, and, as they say, the rest is history.
These and other Federal initiatives during Lincoln's Presidency had a transformative impact on the U.S. economy--creating new industries and millions of new jobs. Again, Lincoln did this despite the fact the Federal Government was deeply in debt--deeply in debt--and running huge deficits to finance the Civil War.
It is almost humorous to imagine how today's Republicans would have reacted to Lincoln's agenda. No doubt they would have attacked him as reckless and irresponsible. They would whine that we are broke and can't afford to invest in the future. I keep hearing this all the time: We can't afford to do this. We can't afford that. We are broke. We are broke. Doesn't anybody understand we are broke?
I keep pointing out the United States is the richest country in the history of mankind--the richest country in the history of mankind. We have the highest per capita income of any nation in the world. So if we are so rich, why are we so broke? We have got to keep asking that question. I am sure the tea party contingent would have demanded that Lincoln be expelled from the party, all of which reminds us how far the modern-day Republican Party has strayed from its progressive, forward-
thinking beginnings. Indeed, the present-day Republican Party would have excoriated President Reagan. I see they just put a new 9-foot statue of him out at National Airport. They should put underneath it,
``He raised taxes in 1982, 1983, and 1984.'' Yes, President Reagan raised taxes in 1982, 1983, and 1984.
Dwight Eisenhower, another Republican, championed one of the greatest public works projects in our history, and that is the building of the Interstate Highway System. A 1996 study of the system concluded that:
The interstate highway system is an engine that has driven 40 years of unprecedented prosperity and positioned the United States to remain the world's preeminent power into the 21st century.
And, of course Franklin Roosevelt in the depths of the Depression put a lot of people to work, and they built a lot of good things. So I thought I would bring this over here. I hang this on the wall in my office. This is my father's--not my grandfather's--WPA card. For all you young people here, you can read your history. WPA stands for the Works Project Administration. It was instituted in the Depression to put people back to work building public works projects. So this is my father's WPA card because he was out of work, and he went to work on WPA. It has his name here, Patrick F. Harkin, Cumming, IA. It says here: You are asked to report, ready for work at once at a project as a laborer, $40.30 per month, 138 hours max, Warren County. Signed by my father.
So my father went to work on WPA, and this is his card. I keep it as a reminder of a lot of things, but also a reminder of the good things the government can do. They gave my father a job. He was married and had five kids and the sixth one on the way--me; no work, no income. Of course, that was before Social Security or Medicare or anything else.
What did they do? Did they stand around doing nothing? Years later, my father took me out to visit some of the projects he worked on, on WPA. There is a place out in Des Moines called Lake Ahquabi. It is a huge State park, it is a recreational facility, campgrounds, Boy Scouts, a big lake there, conference centers, still being used today, built by my father. Well, not by him alone, but he worked on it in the WPA, still being used today. You can go in and look at the high school built by WPA, still being used today, I might add. My father was rather proud of the things he worked on.
When they built the high school, did the government do it? Was it some kind of government entity that built it? No, it was a private contractor. Who dug out the lake and built the things at Lake Ahquabi? Private contractors.
The bill we are going to vote on tomorrow, the public works bill, the putting America back to work jobs bill, would put people all over America back to work on highways and bridges, and sewer and water systems and things such as that, who would be employed by the private sector, by private companies to do the work. And the work needs to be done.
Many of the things my father and others in the WPA worked on in the 1930s still are being used today, although they are crumbling. Someone recently said that we are still driving on Eisenhower's highways and going to Roosevelt's schools.
What is our generation going to do to rebuild that infrastructure for future generations? Well, I guess we are going to sit around here and do nothing, because the Republicans continue to filibuster and block any meaningful jobs bill getting through the Senate.
Mr. McCAIN. Will the Senator yield for a question as to how much more time the Senator will be taking, so we can adjust?
Mr. HARKIN. I would say to my friend from Arizona, less than 10 minutes, about 7 minutes.
Mr. McCAIN. I thank the Senator.
Mr. HARKIN. I thank the Senator.
Investments such as these, investments such as what Abraham Lincoln did or what Eisenhower did or Franklin Roosevelt did, investments that were led by Lyndon Baines Johnson to educate our workforce and to retrain our workforce, to make sure every child had a good education in America, all of these helped people who were unemployed, helped them to get jobs, helped them to become taxpayers, and it set the stage for economic growth in our country.
To me, the most obvious and quickest way to dramatically ramp up our Federal investments in infrastructure is to pass this jobs bill. The American Society of Civil Engineers estimates that America faces a $2.2 trillion infrastructure backlog. Bringing the U.S. infrastructure into the 21st century would rapidly create millions of private sector jobs, especially in the hard-hit construction industry, while modernizing our arteries and veins of commerce.
There could be no economic recovery without robust, forward-thinking investments to boost our competitiveness and put people back to work. This means to invest in education, innovation, the infrastructure in America. It means restoring a level playing field with fair taxation, a good ladder of opportunity to give every American the education they need to gain decent employment and achieve the American dream.
Again, it is all wrapped up in the Rebuild America Jobs Act that we will be voting on here tomorrow. I wish I could say I am hopeful that we could pass it, but I understand the Republicans are going to filibuster it and we won't have the 60 votes needed. That is a shame, because we need to put people back to work and we need to rebuild our infrastructure, and we can't wait much longer to do it.
Mr. President, I yield the floor and I note the absence of a quorum.
The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Franken). The clerk will call the roll.
The legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from South Dakota.
Mr. THUNE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
Unanimous Consent Request--S. 720
Mr. THUNE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Finance be discharged from further consideration of S. 720 and the Senate proceed to its immediate consideration; that the bill be read a third time and passed, the motion to reconsider be laid upon the table, and any statements relating to the measure be printed in the Record.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there objection?
Mr. ROCKEFELLER. Reserving the right to object, which this Senator does, I want to make a comment and then I will give my answer.
Mr. President, the good Senator, who is on the Finance Committee, wants to repeal the CLASS Act. It is called long-term care. To be sure, the CLASS Act is not perfect, but little of what we do in the Senate is perfect. But if there is anything in this country that we ought to be driving toward, it is a long-term care policy, which right now consists of impoverishing yourself and getting rid of your assets, homes, house, whatever, car, in order to classify for Medicaid. That way you can get it. It is called the humiliation of Americans with legitimate health care needs.
The CLASS Act could be amended through the regular legislative process to make it sustainable over the long term, but always our friends on the other side of the aisle find it easier to object and repeal. ``Let's repeal something.'' You don't have to have an alternative in mind. You can leave people in the same sense of suffering as we found way back during the Pepper commission, where people would prostrate themselves in order to qualify for Medicaid, in which they would have a chance at getting some long-term care. We need to discuss this, because it is a huge problem.
In 2008, 21 million Americans had a condition that caused them to need help with their health and personal care. Why? Because Congress has shied away from this subject forever. We have made a habit of shying away from it. Medicare does not cover long-term services and other supports, yet about 70 percent of people over age 65 will require some type of long-term services and support at some point during their lifetime--70 percent of people over 65. As our population ages, the need for services will grow. A little known fact is that about 40 percent of the individuals who need long-term care are under the age of 65, and long-term care services and supports can help these individuals be more independent and be part of the workforce and to have a sense of self-esteem.
Medicare, as I say, does not cover these services. The difference between Medicare and Medicaid and what each of their roles should be is such that there is now a separate agency in Health and Human Services, which I helped promote, which is now sorting out what is the best relationship between the two so they don't have to duplicate each other and so they can clarify roles and get at the problems.
Medicare doesn't cover these services, so Medicaid is in fact the real, de facto, long-term care program in the country. That is what it is. Only after middle-class Americans impoverish themselves are they allowed to get into that situation.
Again, the CLASS Act is not complete as an answer, but it was at long last an attempt on the part of the Congress to do something about it. That in itself was a signal victory. An attempt to help people live with dignity in their homes and communities is not something which we should consider a frivolous matter.
Those who are gloating today about the administration's decision not to carry forward with the CLASS Act are not the fiscal heroes they make themselves out to be. They have no answers. They have no answers. They have no alternatives. But if you can repeal something, boy, you can take that home and people say, Boy, they got rid of that part of government, not having any understanding of what it does to people who have situations either of age or other problems which they cannot help. And they are called people.
Instead, they use this as a political opportunity to bash the President. I was disappointed when the President did this. I was very disappointed. But it doesn't mean we have to go along. Imagine that, bashing the President, using seniors and people with disabilities as a political prop instead of putting forward real solutions. What this place lacks is in fact real solutions. A lot of people like to tease the health care bill. They are, for the most part, wrong. Not entirely wrong. But one thing they can't tease is the fact that a whole bunch of people called Senators and Congressmen and staff members worked hard for a very long 2 years to try and come up with answers. And we did.
Let's have a serious discussion how to meet the current and future needs of seniors and people with disabilities. They are all of our friends. We know them. Those needs are not going away.
Having said that, I object to the Senator's request.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Objection is heard.
Mr. THUNE. Mr. President, I appreciate the objection of the Senator from West Virginia and I appreciate his comments about the importance of long-term care. I agree, it is something we need to address in this country. There are other ideas out there, and I think better ideas, ideas that are based upon incentives as opposed to creating a new government program. But let me get, if I might briefly here, for a moment at what I believe is the real issue.
This was a program destined to fail. It was clear from the beginning many of us said that. There were 12 of my colleagues on the other side, 12 Democrats who voted to strike this particular provision from the health care bill back in December of 2009. I think at that time many of us were making the same arguments the experts are now conceding at the Department of Health and Human Services. In fact, there were colleagues on the other side, one of my Democratic colleagues, who called this ``a Ponzi scheme of the first order, the kind of thing that Bernie Madoff would be proud of.'' That is how it was described before it was voted on and put into the health care bill to help demonstrate the health care bill would actually reduce the deficit.
The fact is, after having had several months to look at this, here we are 19 months or so later, the Department of Health and Human Services has concluded that this doesn't work. They can't make it work. Now the CBO has come out and said it doesn't impact the budget. My view is we ought to pull this, we ought to get it off the books, and we ought to address the issue in a way that makes sense for the American people, not in a way that adds trillions of dollars of additional debt.
If we look at what we have today in terms of unfunded liabilities, we have $61.6 trillion in unfunded liabilities in this country or $528,000 for every family. That is five times what most families have in terms of home mortgages, car mortgages, other types of debt. That is what we are piling on the American people today. This would have been yet another unfunded liability, and the experts warned us at the time.
Now, we did an investigation of this. It was published in September. I worked with some of my House colleagues on it. It was ``The CLASS Act, The Untold Story.'' It concluded that the actuaries at HHS were saying before this bill was even passed that it would be a recipe for disaster, that it would lead to an insurance death spiral, and the Chief Medicare Actuary at HHS said at the time:
. . . 36 years of actuarial experience lead me to believe that this program would collapse in short order and would require significant Federal subsidies to continue.
That is what the experts were saying about this program way back before it was even voted on in 2009.
I think we ought to acknowledge what now everybody concludes to be the case; that is, this program will not work. It is actuarially unsound. We ought to repeal it. We ought to get it off the books, and that was simply what my motion would do. I regret that the other side has objected to it, but I have some of my colleagues today who have been very active on this issue.
I say to my colleague from Arizona, in light of this report that came out from the HHS last month outlining exactly why they cannot move forward with CLASS, it seems difficult to understand why the administration doesn't support repeal of this program. Can my colleague make any sense out of this contradiction and apparent hypocrisy to say a program doesn't work, yet we want to keep it on the books?
Mr. McCAIN. I say to my colleague I do not quite understand it either.
In response to the comments of the Senator from West Virginia about the importance of long-term care, I think all of us understand that. I think all of us who meet and have interface with our constituents recognize that the issue of long-term care is one of transcendent importance. The Senator from West Virginia said he would be glad to make some changes or tweaks to the program. We would be eager to hear of those. We would be eager to hear how we could change the program, the CLASS Act, so it is not, as Senator Conrad, the chairman of the Budget Committee, said of the CLASS Act, ``a Ponzi scheme of the first order, the kind of thing that Bernie Madoff would have been proud of.''
I think it is pretty clear if we accept Senator Conrad's and other objective assessments of the CLASS Act that we have to go back to square one. We are not going to be able to fix a program about which, the Congressional Budget Office said:
. . . the programs would add to budget deficits in the third decade--and in succeeding decades--by amounts on the order of tens of billions of dollars for each 10-year period.
The CLASS program would add to budget deficits in future decades even though the proposals require the Secretary of Health and Human Services to set premiums to ensure the program's solvency for 75 years.
I would like to interject. I know my colleagues share my view. When Senators leave we kind of forget them. Maybe we do not mention them anymore. But we owe a debt of gratitude to Senator Gregg, former Senator from New Hampshire, who put in this provision that required solvency over a period of 75 years before it could be implemented. If it had not been for that provision, we would now be moving forward with a program that, according to the CBO, would add tens of billions of dollars to the deficit in each 10-year period.
Wherever you are, Senator Gregg, and I know you are happier than if you were here, I offer my appreciation and my thanks.
I note the presence of Dr. Barrasso. I think there is something we ought to understand about the CLASS Act. It did have a short-term impact according to the way the Congressional Budget Office ``scores'' things, tells us how much things will add or detract from the deficit, either plus or minus. The fact is, the CLASS Act, in the first 10 years, because younger people would be paying in premiums and would not have gotten to the point where they are eligible for the benefits, it disguised the cost of what we know now as--what we call ObamaCare.
Because of the way they are restricted on scoring, the CLASS Act, at least for 10 years, contributed $70 billion and helped them estimate that the Health Care Reform Act, known as ObamaCare, would have $122 billion in savings, when in reality after the first 10-year period it was tens of billions of dollars in added deficit and burdens on average Americans.
I ask my colleague, Senator Barrasso, Isn't there a way we could address the long-term care problem in America? Isn't there a way we could address this issue without piling on, as the CBO judged the CLASS Act, an increase of tens of billions of dollars to the deficit, which we all know right now is $44,000, I believe, for every man, woman, and child in America?
Mr. BARRASSO. I respond to my colleague from Arizona that we all have concerns for the people of America. That is why we were here trying to offer constructive ideas to make sure people would get the care they need, from the doctor that they want, at a price they can afford.
We heard the President make promises that the cost of premiums would go down $2,500 a family. We have seen instead the premiums have gone up.
We heard the President say: If you like what you have, you can keep it. We saw that we lost out on that. So many people are going to lose the health coverage they like under this new health care law. So I say to my colleague, absolutely there are things we can do and should be doing.
It is astonishing. I received through my medical office the AARP Bulletin. On the cover of this AARP Bulletin for this past month, October 2011, the headline is, ``Senate Leader Reid: The Health Care Law Is Already Working.'' This is what the Senate majority leader has said on the cover of the AARP Bulletin. Yet the Kaiser survey that tracks public views about health care every month has come out with their recent numbers, and the results are astonishing. The American people have seen through this health care law to the point that a majority of Americans now have an unfavorable view of the health care law.
Mr. McCAIN. So we now have about two-thirds of what was advertised as a savings now going by the boards; in other words, $70 billion of the advertised $122 billion in total savings that we voted on not that long ago; is that correct?
Mr. BARRASSO. That is exactly the way I read it, that is the way the American people read it, which is why the overall favorability of the health care law now stands at only 34 percent, an all-time low.
Mr. THUNE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent we be able to enter into a colloquy now for 25 minutes?
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
Mr. THUNE. I would simply say--we have the ranking member of the Budget Committee here too--that it strikes me that there were probably lots of other budget gimmicks in the health care law that are going to come to the surface in the same way this CLASS Act gimmick has. The Senator from Arizona pointed out they tried to understate the true cost by taking a lot of savings in the early years as people were paying premiums, knowing full well in the outyears it was going to add billions of dollars to the deficit. So it was a gimmick that was used, again, to make this salable to the American people and salable here.
In spite of that, there was still a majority of Senators who voted again against this, who actually voted to strike the provision from the health care bill in December of 2009 when I offered that amendment.
It seems to me at least we ought to have bipartisan support now that everyone has come out and recognized what we were trying to tell them in advance: this doesn't work, it was a gimmick, and we ought to get it off the books.
I ask my colleague, the ranking member of the Budget Committee, about this budget gimmick that was used. Is it illogical to think if we have this $2.5 trillion expansion of government in the form of this new health care bill that somehow it is going to reduce the Federal deficit because that was the argument that was made at the time, and that is one of the reasons they were able to make that argument? I suggest there are going to be lots of other gimmicks we are going to uncover to demonstrate this thing was way out of line at the time, but I ask for his comments as being the ranking member of the Budget Committee.
Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, Senator Thune deserves a lot of credit for pursuing this issue tenaciously and seeing his prediction validated now by President Obama's own Secretary that this cannot be a viable program. But he is exactly correct. One of the greatest financial misrepresentations in history, if it continues to be on the books, will be the contention that this health care bill would actually create money for the U.S. Treasury, actually produce a surplus.
They used a 10-year scoring model; $70 billion, 60 percent or so of the total savings this bill is alleged to produce--not savings, actual revenue, net revenue increase--was this program. Now it is gone.
As Senator McCain correctly said, Judd Gregg deserves great credit for it because he put in the bill that the Secretary had to certify that this was a sound program. So after all the political smoke had been going on, after the bill had been passed, while they were defending it as a viable CLASS Act program that would actually produce revenue for the government, when she had to certify it, I suppose, under penalty of perjury--she could go to jail if she didn't do it correctly--she said she could not do so.
It was never possible this bill was going to be a moneymaker for the U.S. Treasury. They double-counted, maybe $300 billion, $400 billion,
$500 billion in money that is Medicare money also counted as income to fund an entirely new bill. That is going to come out also.
As Senator Barrasso has noted, their estimates have been wildly inaccurate concerning the ability to bend the cost curve down, to actually reduce health care costs. This was something a lot of people thought was a good idea. This was going to produce a reduction in our insurance premiums, and since the bill was passed they have gone up dramatically, just the opposite of what was promised.
I think this is a death knell for the entire health care concept. This is just one more example of it. I thank the Senator.
Mr. McCAIN. I say to my colleague, what is a little hard to understand--maybe Dr. Barrasso understands it--the Secretary of Health and Human Services said they can find no way to implement it, after nearly 2 years. So why would there be an objection to Senator Thune having just moved to repeal the CLASS Act?
If they tried for all of these months since the passage of the bill to figure out a way they can meet the Judd Gregg proviso that required the 75-year sustainability, then one would wonder why--one would wonder why we would not just go ahead and repeal it. If there is a better proposal, as we have all agreed, to address the long-term care issue in America, then why don't we sit down at the drawing board and find a way to care for people who, in their most vulnerable years, need government assistance?
I know of no one in this body who is opposed to a viable, reasonable, fiscally sound long-term care program. This is not it. This is not it. It is not even close. So I wondered why my colleagues on the other side of the aisle would refuse to repeal it unless it is some distorted pride in authorship.
Mr. THUNE. I would say to our colleague from Wyoming, who is a physician and has a lot of experience on these issues, who comes down every week with a second opinion talking about all the various issues regarding the health care bill--the more recent one, as we have all seen now is contrary to predictions--health care costs are going up. The predictions were that they would go down. That is also something many of us saw coming.
The question is if we leave this on the books, and if they decide at some point to resurrect it--after they have already acknowledged it doesn't work--and come up with some new language that does away with the Judd-Gregg proviso, what are the fiscal consequences of this program being resurrected? We talked about this, and there were lots of predictions made at the time.
In fact, the Senator from Arizona had statements from some of our colleagues who said on the floor at the time how this was going to be a great deal and how it was going to work. The administration said at the time that this was not a budget gimmick. That is what they were quoted as saying. Clearly this was a budget gimmick. We all know that now. It is a Ponzi scheme. Clearly that is what the actuaries are saying at Health and Human Services.
If, in fact, we don't get this repealed and at some point this program ends up being resurrected, what are the fiscal consequences and implications for the country and future generations who will be saddled with yet another unfunded liability, another entitlement program that is not paid for?
Mr. BARRASSO. I think this is devastating for the country. I told the President directly that overall I thought his proposal was going to bankrupt the country. We stood here and debated over a year ago the fact that the Democrats in this body were voting to take $500 billion away from our seniors on Medicare--not to save Medicare, but to start a whole new government program for somebody else. And when we talk about long-term care and what people need over the course of their lifetime, they took money away from hospice. They took money away from home health. They continue to take money away from hospitals and the physicians who take care of our seniors.
Mr. McCAIN. The popular Medicare Advantage Program.
Mr. BARRASSO. Which has an advantage because it coordinates care. It does a number of things that are important. I believe this is the reason why last week in the Kaiser poll, the number of individuals who have a very favorable view of the overall health care law has dropped to 12 percent, an all-time low. The number of people who think they will personally be better off under the health care law is only 18 percent, an all-time low. The number of people in the country who think that the country as a whole will be better off due to the health care law stands at 28 percent, an all-time low. The American people realize we need truth, honesty in budgeting.
I know my colleague from the Budget Committee is working on that. He has an op-ed I read and has a proposal and is working on that. That is what the American people want. They want some honesty in budgeting, not the kind of politics and budget gimmicks and tricks we see happening here. The American people are tired of being misled and sold a bill of goods. They see through it. They don't like it, they don't want it, and that is why all of the polling on the health care law shows it at an all-time low.
Mr. THUNE. We all saw this coming and we tried our best to prevent it, but now we know and we have these statements that came out as part of the report that was done by the House and Senate, an investigative report called the CLASS Act, the untold story. It was published in September. What it revealed was that the Health and Human Services Department actuaries--the people who are the experts, not the politicians, not those of us who are making many of these statements during the political debate we are having here in the Senate--who are actually responsible for doing the math on this came up and called the CLASS program a recipe for disaster. Those were in internal e-mails we discovered when we were doing this investigation.
Prior to their announcement in October that HHS is not moving forward with the CLASS program at this time, Secretary Sebelius and other officials at the Health and Human Services Department claimed through much of 2011 that the Department had sufficient authority to modify it. What they were trying to suggest is that we can make this work. Yet these internal documents cast significant doubt on all of those assertions.
I will repeat this because I think this is important. The Chief Actuary, during 2009, when this program was being debated--it was a part of the health care bill. It was during the debate here in the Senate. Richard Foster said:
. . . 36 years of actuarial experience lead me to believe that this program would collapse in short order and require significant Federal subsidies to continue.
That was what they were saying in 2009 before this vote ever occurred. He also went on to say:
. . . this would end in an insurance death spiral because the coverage would only be attractive to sicker people who will need costly services. This will force premiums higher and deter healthy individuals from enrolling.
You have all the experts who were putting all this information out there and sharing this with their superiors, all of who were out there on the record promoting this as being something that would work and something that is not a budget gimmick, but actually could, in fact, be actuarially sound. We all know now it was not. It wasn't then and isn't now and that is why we ought to repeal it.
Again, I appreciate my colleagues' input and work on this. I think this is something we ought to end. We need to put the final touches on this program and end it once and for all so it doesn't come back in some other form and saddle future generations with trillions of dollars of additional unfunded liabilities and debt. There are ways we can approach this issue.
In fact, I have some ideas that I introduced in 2007 that deal with long-term care and providing incentives for people that we all are going to be faced with at some point in our lives. But this is the wrong way. It was the wrong prescription at the beginning. It is the wrong prescription now. That is why it ought to be repealed.
Mr. SESSIONS. If I recall, Senator Thune quoted the Chief Actuary, Richard Foster, in his statement that this would collapse during the debate on the floor. This was talked about, but the administration and our Democratic colleagues refused to listen. They continued to repeat the idea that they would have this large surplus. They counted this money as surplus money in justifying voting for passage of this bill when common sense told us in a host of areas, including this one, it was not going to produce a surplus. It goes to mean something systemic about our problem and why this Congress now going into the third year will be borrowing 40 percent of the money the United States spends. It is because the politics here is that we want to pass the bill. When somebody shows it is not actuarially sound and it is going to cost money in the outyears, they don't worry about that; somebody will take care of that in the outyears. It is that kind of mentality that I think has helped overrule commonsense budgeting.
We have not had a budget now in over 900 days in this Senate. So this is not the kind of responsible approach to managing the taxpayers' money.
I know Senator Barrasso raised this repeatedly, that this should not be counted, but did we hear Secretary Sebelius at that time? Back in 2009 she wrote to Senator Kennedy and said to express the administration's support for inclusion of this bill, calling it an innovative bill. They were supporting it, promoting it, totally ignoring the critics and, as a result, they got the bill passed on a straight party-line vote. As a matter of fact, I believe had Senator Brown from Massachusetts taken office 2 weeks sooner, there would not have been the 60 votes necessary to pass it. There would have only have been 59 and the bill would not be law today.
I thank both Senators for their consistent, steadfast explanation of the financial danger of this legislation and their willingness to continue to carry on that fight. I hope we learned something throughout our whole budgetary and financial process here. We cannot continue to play games with the American people's money. We have to be honest with them--honest about our budget, honest about what things are going to cost, and only then can we get the country on a sound footing.
Mr. THUNE. We have to quit making promises we cannot keep. What we are seeing today in Europe and the meltdown that is occurring in the economies over there is a result of too many promises that were made, too much government debt, governments that have gotten too big, that can no longer be supported by the economy in those countries.
That is where we are headed. That is why we have to start living within our means. We have to quit spending money we don't have, and this was a perfect example of the tendency around here to want to grow government, to have a government answer, a government solution for everything, when this makes matters not better but much worse. It makes it much worse for hardworking taxpayers in this country and for future generations of Americans for whom this would become an enormous liability added already to the $528,000 that every family in this country owes, the mortgage they have on their families already as a result of the unfunded liabilities we have already racked up. We cannot keep making promises we cannot keep.
I hope we can get this repealed, and I appreciate my colleagues' hard work in that regard and look forward to getting an opportunity to get it voted on. I am sorry our request this afternoon to repeal it was rejected, but I hope we will get another opportunity to revisit that and perhaps a vote that will actually put people on the Record. I believe there is a majority of Senators who agree with us on this point.
Mr. SESSIONS. I would say a couple of weeks ago the Wall Street Journal, after all of this happened, wrote that ``including this CLASS Act was a special act of fiscal corruption.''
If a private business said: Invest in our company; I have a plan that is going to be sound and it is going to make money in the future, trust me, invest your money with me, vote for me, yet they knew and had evidence in their files and their own employees were saying it was not sound, it was actually going to cost money, I wonder what would happen to them.
Mr. BARRASSO. You would hear about it. This speaks to the problems we have in this body. When they write legislation in the cloak of darkness, behind closed doors, and come in and vote at 1 in the morning and try to jam things through at a time when an administration calls for openness and transparency and then they do this sort of thing with the books in a manipulative way and try to come up with ways to say that it saves money--in any other true, real business, people would go to jail for this sort of behavior, I would assume. Is it wrong? All the way wrong? We have seen other so-called bets that this administration has made which have the American people scratching their head.
Yesterday it was noted that at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, bonuses have been paid to 10 of their executives to the tune of over $12 million. I called for the President to cancel those bonuses. The White House is fairly silent on that. Yet when Senator Obama was running for President, he wrote a letter to the Treasury Secretary and said: Make sure no bonuses go to Freddie and Fannie. Now under his administration,
$12 million, it was reported yesterday, went to 10 executives. It doesn't seem to be a problem now. The White House said there is nothing they can do about it. Well, why not get the Secretary of the Treasury involved? That is what Candidate Obama did in 2008. It is time for this White House to stand up and do what is right.
Mr. SESSIONS. Let me say a more accurate explanation of how this happened. The Congressional Budget Office scored this as a surplus, indeed, over 10 years. And, as Senator McCain said, the benefits only come out after 5 years and these are people paying in, so the real benefits and payments take place in outer years.
The question is, Is the plan sufficient to be actuarially sound for the distant future when the payouts occur? So what happened was, Mr. Orszag had been CBO Director. He said it was not a gimmick and not a Ponzi scheme. In one sense, he was telling the truth. He was using a window score from the Congressional Budget Office over the first 10 years, when it didn't pay out any benefits and had a surplus, to claim that this was going to make the bill itself financially sound. In a sense, to me, it is these kinds of gimmicks that might keep somebody from being prosecuted and sent to jail if they were a private person.
This ought to end in the Congress. I think the American people are crying out for honesty in budgeting. They want us to be responsible. They want us to tell them the good news but to also tell them the bad news financially that we face.
They know we can't do things we would like to do if we don't have the money. They know we don't have the money to keep taking on new obligations. So I feel as though this is not healthy.
When Secretary Sebelius came along and had to certify that they had a 75-year actuarially sound program, there was no way she could do it. It knocks a gaping hole into the entire scheme, this health care bill.
I think it is a lesson for all of us. On every vote we do, we need to be sure we are honest not only in the short-term window but in the long-term window also.
Mr. THUNE. Too often, the practice around here is focused on the short term, the near term, the gain, to be able to have some sort of political victory at the expense of what is in the best interests of this country and our children and grandchildren. This is a perfect example of that. I appreciate my colleagues being here. This discussion will be continued.
I yield the floor.
Mr. BARRASSO. Mr. President, I note the absence of a quorum.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
The legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
Mr. VITTER. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
Mr. VITTER. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that Senator Sessions and I have up to 15 minutes for a colloquy.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
LSU Versus Alabama
Mr. VITTER. Mr. President, Senator Sessions and I come to the floor following a discussion of a lot of important issues on the floor to discuss the most important issue back home for us this week, which is the upcoming regular season national championship game between LSU and Alabama. In the history of the SEC, this is the first ever regular season matchup between a No. 1 and No. 2 team in the SEC. As most folks probably know, LSU and Alabama are both 8 to 0 overall and 5 to 0 in the SEC.
Obviously, I know who is going to win. The Tigers are going to win. They have beaten five ranked opponents this year, three of those away from home, as we are going to have to play Alabama. They have outscored all opponents 314 to 92 this year. Not to get cocky or anything, but LSU has beaten Alabama 8 out of the last 11 years, including 4 of the last 5 times in Tuscaloosa.
We have a lot of strengths. Our senior quarterback Jarrett Lee leads the SEC in passing efficiency. We have a ferocious defense led by lineman Sam Montgomery and defensive backs Tyrann Mathieu and Mo Claiborne. Tyrann, by the way, is much better known as Honey Badger. This is a prelude to the BCS championship which, by the way, is going to be in January in New Orleans in the Superdome.
So we feel great going into this game, and that is why I was very eager to get with both Senators from Alabama and have a friendly wager which the Senator from Alabama will explain. The loser is going to treat the winners to some great gulf shrimp and other seafood. We feel great about it, so we look forward to it.
As I turn the floor over to Senator Sessions, I would just summarize our feelings in Louisiana in a simple way: You all have a great team--
maybe one of the best Alabama teams ever--but it doesn't matter who LSU's opponent is because, as we say in Louisiana, the Honey Badger takes what he wants. We are looking forward to doing that on Saturday night.
Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, I thank Senator Vitter for those comments. We are going to look forward to being very hospitable to the fabulous LSU fans who will be in Tuscaloosa for the ``Titanic tussle in Tuscaloosa,'' the game of the century, many are calling it, the match of the millennium, between Alabama and LSU. It is always a big game, and it is going to be a big game especially this year.
While we have a minute on the floor and there is no other business being conducted, I just wish to celebrate college football, particularly in the Southeastern Conference. When we go to those games and see the color and the crowd and the enthusiasm and the roar for the home team, it is a thrilling event. It is very special. The fans in Tuscaloosa are very sophisticated. They know this is a big game, one of the biggest games in the history of the University of Alabama, and they know when good plays are good and bad plays are bad. It is going to be exciting. They know LSU is consistently one of the great teams in America.
So Alabama is doing pretty well: Eight and zero, their all-star defense is No. 1 in scoring and No. 1 in total defenses. They also have their No. 1 rushing defense in the country, allowing only 44 yards per game, a historic number that ranks better than Alabama's national championship game in 1992 and the undefeated and untied 1966 team. So it is going to be a special time.
Our university is a great university. The University of Alabama has been growing in strength for years now. It has one of the greatest presidents in America: Dr. Robert D. Witt, who was my high school classmate, and Judy Bonner is the provost there, sister of Congressman Jo Bonner. So it is an exciting time in Alabama in general. Academically and otherwise, the University of Alabama is doing great--
one of its best years in its history.
I wish to also point out and thank the LSU fans and chefs John Folse and Rick Tramonto, along with Bob Baumhower and Steve Zucker from Alabama, for sponsoring the LouisiBama Gumbo Bowl to benefit tornado victims in Tuscaloosa. That shows true class in both of the schools' fan base. For all the talk going on this week, I hope to see the kind of respect this partnership indicates among all our fans.
While I don't think it will happen, should Les Miles and his team somehow manage to get out of Tuscaloosa with a victory, I would love to treat Senator Vitter and Senator Landrieu to some of the finest gulf seafood there is, healthy and straight from the Gulf of Mexico, which my colleague knows is fresher and cleaner and finer than it ever has been, and maybe we could garnish it with some of the best grass that marks the field at Bryant Denny Stadium. I understand Les Miles is a fan. I would also be more than happy to bring my friend, Senator Vitter, an Alabama tie on the Monday after the game, which I think would look good if he were to wear it on the floor of the Senate.
Mr. VITTER. Mr. President, should the unthinkable happen, I will do that. Should the unthinkable happen, I will deliver fresh, healthy gulf seafood to Senator Sessions' office as well as Senator Shelby's. We have been in contact with Senator Shelby's office and Senator Landrieu's office and they are part of this friendly arrangement as well. So we will look forward to that. But, most of all, we will look forward to a great game Saturday night, and we will both look forward to a win Saturday night. One of us will have to be disappointed--we will see who--but it is going to be a great game.
Mr. SESSIONS. I thank Senator Vitter for his friendship and good service in the Senate. We work on so many things together. But college football is special, and I think the game this weekend will be one of the great games in college history. I am so excited about it. I know the fans in both our States, and throughout the country, are excited about it.
Mr. VITTER. Amen.
With that, we yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
The legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
Mr. MENENDEZ. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
Mr. MENENDEZ. Mr. President, I came to the floor to speak about a different type of football. It seems to be a political football that some of our colleagues are playing on the question of getting America back to work again. I am amazed at the political posturing we have seen this year.
I know for some of our colleagues on the other side, this election cycle has been driven by tea party economics that demand political purity over good governance. They have said no to just about everything. The problem with no to everything is that no doesn't create a job, no doesn't build an economy, no doesn't create prosperity, no doesn't get America moving again. They have said no to every different venture we have had to try to put America back to work.
Certainly, back in my home State of New Jersey, what I hear from the average citizen is: Senator, help me get back to work. Because I have New Jerseyans who come up to me, sometimes with tears in their eyes, and say: This is the first time in my life I have been unemployed. While that has created a significant economic consequence to them and their family, it has shaken something even more profound, which is that social contract, that promise in America that if I prepare myself, work hard and sacrifice, I get ahead, and my children will do better than I did growing up. That has been shaken to the core by the economic challenges we inherited as a result of the crisis of 2008 and that we have been working out of.
So I have a problem when, every time we come to the floor to offer an opportunity to get those New Jerseyans, to get those Americans back to work, all I hear is no.
They say no, refusing to invest in rebuilding our infrastructure, to creating jobs, to keeping us competitive in a global economy.
They know roads and highways and bridges in their States--in every State--are in critical need of improvement, and yet we have to come here time and time again, day after day, to fight back a politically charged, ideologically fueled opposition that says one thing but does another.
The fact is, even those who oppose this legislation for political reasons know good governance means investing in our future. It means putting Americans back to work. In an economy in which 70 percent of GDP is consumer demand, if there is no job, there is no money, and if there is no money, there is no demand. So in addition to the lives of New Jerseyans and Americans which we could positively affect, this is about our global picture in terms of our economy. It means also keeping us competitive in this global economy.
Let me talk about that global economy for a moment because we are in it. We see what happens in Europe, and we see how we are affected here at home with our markets and whatnot. But let's look at a different place. Let's look at China. Let's look at the competition. According to China's 5-year plan, they have a range of investment priorities for the future: clean energy technology; biotechnology, including pharmaceutical and vaccine production; high-tech equipment for manufacturing airplanes; a new space program and satellites.
In fact, this week they launched a satellite, the first step toward a Chinese space station by the end of the decade.
China is planning more high-speed rail, next generation powerplants and manufacturing facilities, new nuclear, solar, and wind energy technologies.
The plan calls for building new energy-efficient cars and adding 9,000 kilometers to their highway system, expanding their national high-speed rail system to 45,000 kilometers, and building light rail systems in 21 urban metropolitan areas.
They are planning 6 new heavy material ports, adding 440 new 10,000-
ton shipping berths; a second Beijing airport; and 11 regional airports.
This is some pretty stiff competition that will allow Chinese businesses to thrive.
This is the challenge we have. Yes, we have a debt question in our country, and we must meet that challenge. There is no question we should and we can and we must. But by the same token, we need to grow this economy as part of meeting that challenge, an economy that was on the brink of ruin when this administration inherited it, an economy that--I will never forget that famous meeting or infamous meeting in September of 2008 that was called by the Chairman of the Federal Reserve that members of the Banking Committee and others were called to. I remember going to it and listening to him describe a series of financial institutions that were on the verge of bankruptcy and collapse and in doing so would have created systemic risk to the entire country's economy and being on the verge not of the great recession we talked about but a new depression. That is what we have been working out of.
But even in this economy, we have to make investments and build for a competitive future. We invest just 2 percent of our gross domestic product on infrastructure projects. Europe and China invest between 5 and 9 percent, respectively.
The President today called on Congress to up the ante. The American Jobs Act would invest $50 billion in our transportation infrastructure and $10 billion in a national infrastructure bank, putting hundreds of thousands of construction workers back on the job. But it is not just the construction workers. Certainly, we want to get them back to work. It is all the architectural firms, all the engineering firms, all the people who work at those firms who will help build this infrastructure. It is all the suppliers for all the materials that will be needed to do this and everybody who produces those supplies and everybody who transports it and everybody who installs it. So it is an enormous ripple effect in getting our people back to work--hundreds of thousands waiting to work, working for America's future.
Clearly, opposition to the Rebuild America Jobs Act is not about good governance because we have ways and we have offered ways to pay for this fully. It is about politics. It is about playing political games. But it is playing political games with the lives and livelihoods of American families.
While China is planning major investments in retooling for their new economy, we cannot even seem to agree to fix our own roads. It is akin to the story of Nero fiddling while Rome burned, except American families and businesses are the ones who are going to get burned in this story.
The President today released a report that highlights the importance of rebuilding our roads and bridges and railways and airports and has cited important projects around the country. They include over 17,000 jobs in New Jersey that would put people to work making our future brighter.
One of the projects the President's report highlights as an example of success is in New Jersey: the Route 52 causeway bridge replacement between Somers Point and Ocean City in Atlantic and Cape May Counties. This is a critical emergency evacuation route for Ocean City during floods and hurricanes. The new bridge eliminates the need to raise the drawbridge at the old section that is still being replaced. This is a critical $400 million project that is an investment in New Jersey, in our community, in our infrastructure that will upgrade an old bridge to meet today's needs, protect the community, and put people to work.
We can make these investments and still find ways to responsibly reduce the deficit. An investment is not even just about new projects, of course. It is about maintaining the very infrastructure we have already spent money on in the past that we need to preserve for future use.
Thirty-six percent of New Jersey's bridges are structurally deficient or functionally obsolete. Seventy-eight percent of New Jersey's major roads are listed in poor or mediocre condition. Sixty-four percent of New Jersey highways are chronically congested because of a 29-percent increase in vehicle travel on New Jersey's highways from 1990 to 2007. All of that, and we already have $13 billion worth of maintenance projects on hold because we do not have the money to pay for them.
Those are just numbers in one respect, but those numbers are about lives. Because when we have infrastructure--major roads, major highways--that are in bad condition, it means we are sitting more time in traffic and less time being productive at work or having more quality time with our families. It means businesses that have a product they need to get to the marketplace are going over an infrastructure that means it takes more time. It takes longer to get that product to market. It has consequences. It adds to the costs. It creates an uncompetitive set of circumstances. It is about the quality of our lives and our economy at the same time.
That $13 billion is not to add even any capacity to New Jersey's transportation system. It is just to keep the status quo. As I have said for quite some time, as we have attempted, with my colleague, Senator Lautenberg, to build a new Trans-Hudson Passenger Rail Tunnel, which is critically needed in that region--and we have learned since September 11 that multiple modes of transportation are incredibly important so that, God forbid, if we have a tragedy again--we learned on that day, when all the bridges were closed and all the tunnels were closed that ferries brought people out of downtown Manhattan to New Jersey, ultimately, to be taken to hospitals--multiple modes of transportation and options are critical for our economy. They are also critical for our security. Yet we cannot even keep up-to-date that which we have, much less create a new Trans-Hudson tunnel that would open the entire region with its economic opportunities. We cannot grow if we are stuck. In that region, as in many regions of the country, we are stuck.
We can begin the long-overdue process of maintaining, rehabilitating, and replacing if we pass this legislation. We can do it if we act together as a nation, as we did in 1956. In 1956, it was a Republican administration that created the Interstate Highway System, and now we cannot seem to get one Republican to vote to maintain that system. In 2011, we cannot get one Republican to vote to help keep us competitive and put Americans back to work.
We need our Republican colleagues in Congress to end the roadblock and fix the roads. They need to vote yes to providing every State with the resources they need to repair and rebuild aging roads and bridges and put people back to work.
Think of the jobs we could create nationwide if we publicly committed to investing enough to keep up and stay competitive with the Chinas of the world. Even if China is able to meet only a fraction of its ambitious goals, it will be far beyond the course we are presently on.
In 1956--I want to go back to that history--under a Republican President, Dwight Eisenhower, Congress passed the Federal Aid Highway Act. It took 35 years, but we committed this Nation to building 46,876 miles of highway--one of the largest public works projects at that time in the Nation's history. Why? Because a young Army officer, Dwight Eisenhower, saw the need.
He drove across the country in an Army convoy that left Washington on July 7, 1919, went to Gettysburg, and took the old Lincoln Highway to San Francisco. On the journey, bridges cracked and had to be rebuilt, vehicles got stuck in the mud, equipment broke, and they did not arrive on the west coast--they left on July 7--
they did not arrive on the west coast until September 6--a 2-month journey that gave birth to the American Interstate Highway System.
Let's not be so shortsighted that we will turn back the clock to the days of the old Lincoln Highway. I understand the need to reduce our deficit, and these provisions I have talked about that I support are paid for. But I do not understand the blind commitment to doing nothing, refusing to invest in our future and create American jobs in the process and calling it good governance.
Good governance is what President Eisenhower did when he signed the Federal Highway Act into law. Now it is up to us to invest in maintaining it. Let's be honest with ourselves about the fact that good governance means investing in our Nation, in our people, in our progress, in our prosperity, in our future. Investing in our infrastructure is an investment in our country and in our future. Let's put today's ideologically driven politics aside and recall the practical Republican politics of President Eisenhower who saw a national need and had the will and the wisdom to put the Nation to work to build it.
So I ask my colleagues: Where is the Grand Old Republican Party that united America behind an interstate highway system and put government and people to work to make it happen?
If we put aside the ideological posturing, if we put aside the suggestion I have heard many times that the major goal is--by some of our Republican colleagues--to make Barack Obama a one-term President and then, ultimately, use both the filibuster to stop progress in the Senate and/or use a constant ``no'' vote to stop progress for the Nation under the guise that is the way President Obama will fail--the problem with that is, that is, at the end of the day, in my mind, not about President Obama failing, that is about the Nation failing at one of the most critical times in our country's history and one of the most critical times in our economy.
If we can put aside the ideological posturing, if we can put aside the political strategy and gamesmanship, if we are honest with ourselves about what good governance means and what it means to American families to invest in creating jobs and keeping us globally competitive so that we can continue to grow that economy and create other jobs for individuals that will help them realize their hopes and dreams and aspirations, that will help them contribute to the Nation, that will create new revenues that will be part of meeting our debt challenge, we would pass this legislation and make it happen. That is the opportunity before the Senate. It is one I hope our colleagues will grasp.
I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.
The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Whitehouse). The clerk will call the roll.
The bill clerk proceeded to call the roll.
Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
Sanctuary Cities
Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, earlier today my friend and colleague from Illinois, Senator Durbin, came to the floor and criticized--
wrongly, I believe--my State of Alabama and the State of Arizona for something that I would think we would all want every State and locality to do; that is, cooperate in the enforcement of Federal immigration law.
Alabama and Arizona are undertaking a legitimate effort in attempting to help enforce the laws of the United States when this administration too often has failed to do so. The American people and the rule of law in our country have suffered as a result.
This administration has flatly refused to enforce our national laws--
generous immigration laws that they are--despite the fact that there is on the books extensive and a fair code of laws designed to facilitate substantial, legal immigration into our country. Moreover, the Obama administration is systematically going after States that attempt to assist--Arizona, Alabama, now South Carolina, and Indiana next. Even more egregious is that the administration has refused to take any action against States and localities that affirmatively, proactively, and intentionally impede the immigration enforcement in the United States. These jurisdictions include San Francisco County, Santa Clara County, Washington, DC, and perhaps the most egregious example: Cook County, IL, which recently passed an ordinance--passed an ordinance directing local Illinois law enforcement officials to ignore U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detainers.
The detainers are sent to local jails, and they request that officials at those jails detain illegal aliens for an additional 48-
hour period, statutorily provided, after that local jurisdiction's business with that immigrant ceases so that an ICE officer may place an alien into Federal custody. This is done on all kinds of crimes throughout the country. People are arrested in Alabama; Georgia has charges against them, and they send a detainer. If someone is arrested in Illinois and the Federal Government has a charge against them, they place a detainer. So when they are finished in that trial or with their sentence, before they are released out on the street, they are turned over to the other jurisdiction. Maybe it is a murder charge. Maybe it is a serious felony charge. This happens every day in America. It is common practice. If it were to cease, law enforcement in this country would be dealt a devastating blow.
Cook County has decided that it gets to decide who gets deported from the country and when, and acting in this way directly undermines Federal law enforcement. When testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee last week, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said, incredibly, that she has had no contact with Cook County and has had no discussions with the Attorney General of the United States on this issue.
So today Senators Grassley, Cornyn, Coburn, and I sent a letter to Secretary Napolitano, and we requested that she and others in the administration consider taking action against Cook County and other local jurisdictions that purposefully and deliberately undermine the laws of the United States and offer sanctuary to illegal aliens who have broken our laws by entering the country illegally. Is there no consequence to that in this country now? If that is so, aren't we, in fact, putting up a sign on our borders that says: Just get by the border and you are home free, nothing will ever happen to you. Isn't that a magnet to more illegal immigration? Isn't that a mixed message to the world? Don't we need to be sending a good and decent message; that is, we believe in immigration. We are a nation of immigrants. We have the most generous immigration laws in the world, but you must comply with them. We can't accept everybody who would like to come whenever they would like to come. We have to ask people to file applications, meet certain qualifications, and come when your time has come to come to America.
That is what law is all about. That is why people want to come to this country, frankly, because in their countries they have no law, and they don't have the opportunity to earn something and be able to keep it.
Since the implementation of this ordinance in Chicago, over 40 suspected illegal aliens arrested on felony charges have been released from Cook County jails. Last week, the Executive Associate Director of Enforcement and Removal Operations at the Federal Department of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, ICE, told my staff that Cook County presents a major problem for immigration enforcement efforts. In fact, he said that Cook County, IL, is the most egregious example of sanctuary city policies and is ``an accident waiting to happen.'' Yet the head of the Department of Homeland Security stands silent, and the Justice Department is too busy prosecuting States that are trying to cooperate and uphold the law of the United States.
Senator Durbin said that no State is above the law, but it is these sanctuary jurisdictions, such as Cook County, and not States such as Alabama, Arizona, South Carolina, and Indiana that need to remember they are not above the law.
The truth is that this is yet another example of a longtime trend in Chicago of elected officials placating immigration law breakers while thumbing their noses at Federal law enforcement, jeopardizing public safety, and pretending that what they do is honorable and good and for the taxpayers who elected them. But releasing dangerous criminals is a dangerous thing to do. Releasing dangerous criminals--it could be a person who goes and murders someone, as we have seen time and time again.
The Cook County commission passed this order less than a month after Chicago-based open-borders group National Immigrant Justice Center sued the Department of Homeland Security, challenging the constitutionality of these ICE detainers--things that have been done by every State, city, and county throughout America for decades, hundreds of years--
since the founding of our Republic, I suppose. The lawsuit undoubtedly influenced the Cook County commission. They decided they would be open about it in voting in favor of this ordinance. So if one of those illegal aliens arrested on felony charges and released by Cook County commits a crime now, Cook County officials are to blame for it.
We should not release someone when the Federal authorities place a detainer on them. They do not do that very often. They do not do it nearly enough, frankly. So there will be a good reason for sure if they place a detainer on them, and to ignore that is really stunning.
So sanctuary jurisdictions such as Cook County, IL, undermine the ability of law enforcement personnel to enforce the laws that are on the books now and represent a threat to our security. These jurisdictions cannot choose if and when they will turn over illegal aliens charged with a crime and wanted by ICE.
So if we are going to talk about who is and who is not above the law, I suggest that my good friend--and we have worked together on a number of things, some of them criminal justice issues--the Senator from Illinois needs to clean up his own backyard rather than casting unfounded criticisms on States that are taking up a valuable effort to see that our immigration laws actually are enforced, to help end the lawlessness that has caused so much disruption in our country and upset the American people.
The American people are not anti-immigrant. We are a nation of immigrants. The American people are not opposed to people being able to come to our country. The American people do not dislike people who are here. Their anger is basically addressed to those of us in authority who are failing to maintain a lawful system of immigration, one that we can be proud of, one that is consistently enforced throughout the country. I believe that is what we should be striving for in our Nation, and if somebody wants to change the law and allow more people to come or fewer people to come, let's vote on it and have it right here on the floor of the Senate, and maybe we can have some changes.
But, fundamentally, it is the duty of Homeland Security, it is the duty of the Department of Justice to enforce the laws as they exist. They do not get to make the laws and enforce them. It is the duty and responsibility of Cook County to participate with the Federal Government in fulfilling its basic duties, such as honoring detainment. When you do not have that, we have a real problem in our country.
So I would suggest that the Attorney General take a little timeout from his lawsuit against Arizona or Alabama or other States and focus a little bit of his attention on a major jurisdiction such as Cook County that is willfully and deliberately acting to undermine Federal law enforcement.
I yield the floor, and I suggest the absence of a quorum.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
The bill clerk proceeded to call the roll.
Mrs. HUTCHISON. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
Mrs. HUTCHISON. Mr. President, I rise today to speak on the bill before the Senate--the Rebuild America Jobs Act. The Rebuild America Jobs Act contains a variation of a bill that I cosponsored with Senator Kerry--we call it the BUILD Act. It is the Building and Upgrading Infrastructure for Long-Term Development Act, and so we call it BUILD. But the changes that have been made in the bill that is before us today are untenable, and I cannot support it.
Last March, I introduced the bipartisan BUILD Act along with Senators Kerry, Warner, and Graham. It puts forward a method of addressing our infrastructure needs that I think is the right way forward. The need and demand for greater infrastructure investment is unprecedented. The American Society of Civil Engineers estimates that a $2.2 trillion investment is needed over the next 5 years to restore our infrastructure to an adequate condition. Ignoring these needs hampers our economic growth, impedes the flow of inter- and intrastate commerce, and slows the development and distribution of domestic energy production. We should consider new, innovative ways of financing our infrastructure. Traditional government mechanisms alone cannot keep pace with our national demand.
Our legislation--Senator Kerry's and mine--creates the American Infrastructure Financing Authority. This would be an independent authority designed to facilitate private investment in critical infrastructure projects. It is designed like a bank, providing loans or loan guarantees for regionally or nationally significant projects in transportation, energy and water sectors.
Let me emphasize that this will not provide grants. Grants will not be given. They will not be allowed. Nationally significant projects or regional projects would be at least $100 million. There is a $25 million category for rural areas, but we are not looking at a stimulus where we go in and provide financing for small projects. This is for dams, for desalination plants, or for an electric grid that isn't working and causing brownouts in major areas.
We are talking about big dollars that are not easily raised in the government sector or the private sector alone because it doesn't make economic sense, unless we put the loans and the loan guarantees together. There is a prohibition against spending more than 50 percent of the project cost, and the other 50 percent has to have come from another source--a private source or a State or local government source.
In addition, there has to be a revenue stream that will have the ability to pay this loan back. We want the loans paid back so that more infrastructure can be built. So we are talking about a revenue stream from, say, water bills, if it is a water desalination plant that is going to provide water for economic development, or if it is a dam that is going to provide electricity, we have electric bills. But we have to have a revenue source. So we have narrowed our legislation so that it will have the ability to pay back the loan. It is going to be something that can work.
In its first 10 years, it is estimated that our BUILD Act would provide $160 billion in financial assistance for major projects like this. So if it would be highways or bridges, there would be a toll that would be necessary for the transportation--something that would have a revenue stream to pay these back but allow them to be built because the private sector is sitting on the sidelines right now.
The bank would not replace our existing Federal funding mechanism, but it would supplement them for the large projects that have a major public benefit. The bank administering this fund would apply sound underwriting principles to assess the risk of a loan or loan guarantee.
The BUILD Act would require an initial appropriation. Senator Kerry and I have committed to identifying a reasonable offset. Additional deficit spending has never been an option for the BUILD Act. So it would be $10 billion that would be taken from a program today and put into this long-term bank so we can match loans and loan guarantees with private funds or State or local funds and do big things, not little things, except in rural areas where there is a $25 million threshold. It is going to be $100 million or more, and no more than 50 percent of it can be from this program.
I appreciate the fact the bill before us incorporates some elements of the BUILD Act and seeks to correct some of the flaws in the previous infrastructure bank proposals that have been put forward by the administration. However, I think the differences between our BUILD Act and the legislation brought forward by the majority leader take away the bipartisan appeal of the bill.
Let me also say there is in this legislation--in addition to the $10 billion in the long-term plan Senator Kerry and I introduced--a $50 billion stimulus package, which is why I couldn't possibly support this bill. It is another $50 billion stimulus package. I appreciate the need for investment--obviously, that is why I support the BUILD Act--but $50 billion in the bill in addition to the $10 billion bank is more of the same type of stimulus that has not worked. It is more debt. Well, I guess it isn't more debt because they pay for it with a tax, which is even worse. The bill before us has the $50 billion added to it, and it is paid for with a surtax on people who are making more than $1 million a year, and mostly from their businesses. That is why I can't support it. It proposes a permanent tax increase to pay for a temporary spending program. That is bad policy in itself.
Raising taxes on incomes that would harm business owners and job creators is part of the reason people aren't hiring today. The President keeps talking about more taxes on business. On top of the Obama health care plan, it is causing businesses not to hire people, and we have a 9-percent unemployment rate in this country.
So I think it is important we defeat the bill before us and try to come up with something that is more akin to the BUILD Act that Senator Kerry and I have put forward. Data from an August 2011 Treasury report says four out of five people who would be hit by the surtax are business owners--the same people we need to encourage to create jobs.
I think it is going to be essential, if we are going to try to create jobs in our country, that we stop talking about surtaxes on businesses. We have to stop talking about more costs, and we have to stop the overregulation. We have overregulation, the talk of more taxes, and we have the Obama health care plan that is going to have fines and taxes that are coming after the next election when that all comes together. Businesspeople are seeing this and saying: I am going to hold where I am now instead of hiring people and getting our economy jump-started.
So I think job creation should be the key of anything we do in this Congress. It should be our focus. It should be the priority, and that means we should have conditions in the private sector that will create job growth. The bill before us today is simply another $50 billion stimulus plan that we have already seen doesn't work, and it is paid for with a new tax that is going to further stifle business hiring.
Now more than ever we must focus our efforts in this Congress on commonsense measures that will jump-start the economy and make our businesspeople think it is worth hiring. Then we will have a surge in the private sector, which is the sector that can create jobs that will last.
So I am not going to be able to vote for the bill before us, but I would like to urge my colleagues to look at the Kerry-Hutchison bill that offers a long term approach. It is not going to be immediate because it would take up to a year to set up this bill. But we shouldn't be just talking about today. We shouldn't just be talking about something that will jump-start the economy between now and the end of the year. We should also be looking at the long term as well. We should be looking at the long term fiscal situation and how we assure that not only are we trying to jump-start right now but that we are looking forward to the future. That is what a true BUILD Act would do. That is what an infrastructure bank that is put in place with solid principles would do.
The Kerry-Hutchison bill is such a bill. The bill that is before us is not.
I hope we will be able to have a chance for our bill to go through the Finance Committee and to get suggestions from our colleagues on ways to strengthen it. But the bill before us today would hurt our economy, hurt job creation, and that is not the direction we should be going.
Mr. President, I yield the floor, and I suggest the absence of a quorum.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
The bill clerk proceeded to call the roll.
The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Bennet). The Senator from Illinois.
Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
Mr. DURBIN. I ask unanimous consent to speak as in morning business.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, I just left a meeting with President Obama at the White House, and we discussed the jobs bill that is pending before the Senate. It is a bill which the President put together and presented to Congress almost 2 months ago. He invited the Republicans at that time to come forward with their ideas, and hoped that we could come up with a bipartisan approach to dealing with the 9-percent-plus unemployment in our country and the 14 million people out of work, not to mention another 10 million who are underemployed and could do better with a better job.
We had a briefing this morning from an economist from labor and business who talked about some of the realities facing America today, and they are daunting: that one out of five men in this country is out of work; that we have seen, since 1969, a 28-percent decline in the purchasing power of working families in America; that we are seeing growth rates which are at least anemic and maybe even worse in terms of the future of our economy.
There are those who are criticizing the President and saying his approach is all wrong. But what those who criticize him offer is nothing. Nothing. There is no Republican plan for creating jobs in this country. It is a litany of complaints that they have had about the Federal Government for decades. For example, they argue there are too many rules and regulations, and that is what is impeding job growth.
I spent 2 straight weeks going across Illinois visiting businesses, large and small, that have done well in this recession. Not a single one has raised that issue. None. I don't think that is a real issue. It is an issue that we should be concerned about when it comes to job creation. It is not an issue for causation.
Secondly, the Republican approach has been, and consistently so, that the most important thing they can do is to protect the income taxes paid by the wealthiest people in America. That is not why I was sent to Congress. I believe my responsibility is to look to the common good and beyond the wealthiest in this country, particularly to help working families who are struggling so much.
The bill that will come up tomorrow will give the Republicans a chance to join us again in part of the jobs bill which they used to support. Some of the elements of that bill are pretty straightforward:
$60 billion that will be spent on infrastructure, $50 billion for transportation funding, and another $10 billion for the infrastructure bank. Of that, $27 billion is for highways across America. I will take a big chunk of that in Illinois, and I will bet you will in Colorado. There is plenty to be done out there to alleviate congestion, to make the roads safer. There is another $9 billion for mass transit. We need it desperately. Mass transit, of course, keeps people off the highways, moves them back and forth to work in a most economical way. Our mass transit systems in Illinois and most places could use a shot in the arm with an investment for safety and for reliability. There is $4 billion for high-speed inner city passenger rail corridors. That is working in Illinois, proof positive, almost $1 billion in our State. We got the money, incidentally, that the Republican Governor of Wisconsin said he didn't want. We said we will take it in Illinois and the people in Wisconsin can wave as the train goes by. We are going to put that money into better rail beds, faster service, more reliability.
We broke all records in Amtrak passenger volume a few weeks ago, 30 million passengers, the most ever in any 1 year in Amtrak history. Eighty-two percent of passengers say they are satisfied with the good service of Amtrak. It is an enterprise that has a lot of support in America, and we want it to grow. Unfortunately, the other side has come out against it many times. So the President has put $2 billion directly into Amtrak. They can use it for new trains, new locomotives, and passenger cars built in America. How about that? Good-paying jobs in our country. There is $3 billion for TIGER and TIFIA grant loan assistance, $2 billion for FAA improvement grants, $1 billion for FAA NextGen air traffic control. And for the record, those of us who fly on airplanes every week think this is long overdue. The air traffic control system in America is based on science that is decades old and goes back to World War II, and it is time to move beyond it. And we can, but we need to invest to make sure that happens. Then there is $10 billion for the national infrastructure bank. That is absolutely critical for us so that we can continue to grow and continue to build.
When I look at this, what it translates into is pretty amazing. It would put people to work upgrading 150,000 miles of road in America, laying or maintaining 4,000 miles of train tracks, restoring 150 miles of runways at airports, and putting in place a NextGeneration air traffic control system to reduce time delays and add safety. The plan includes $27 billion for roads and bridges, $9 billion, as I mentioned, for transit systems, and money for a competitive grant program, $5 billion, $4 billion for construction of high-speed rail. It is no wonder this has been supported not only by the labor unions--they want to put people back to work--but by businesses all across America that have an interest in highway construction.
The national infrastructure bank, of $10 billion, will leverage private and public capital to fund a broad range of infrastructure projects. The bank would be based on a bill introduced by Senators John Kerry and Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas, which has been endorsed by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. So if you think these are all Democratic ideas with no business support, one of the central elements here, the infrastructure bank, has the support of the Chamber of Commerce. It builds on legislation offered by Senators Rockefeller and Lautenberg, and long-time bank champion Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro.
How do we pay for this? I think that is where the conversation starts falling apart on the floor of the Senate. We pay for it and don't add to the deficit by adding a new income tax surtax on those making over
$1 million a year. Listen carefully. Those making over $1 million a year. So you have to already be making $20,000 a week before you pay the first penny in new taxes, and the tax just applies to the additional money over $1 million, and it is 0.7 percent.
I want to apologize, for the record. I think I misstated this earlier when I said that for the first $100 of new income over $1 million, that those who were millionaires would pay 7 cents more in taxes. I misstated it. I missed it by a factor of 10. It turns out to be 70 cents instead of 7 cents. So the burden is 10 times what I suggested.
For every $100 a millionaire earns over $1 million, under this bill to put America to work, they would have to pay 70 cents. The Republicans have said, ``Unacceptable.'' It is unconscionable that we would tax what they call the job creators.
We did a survey, incidentally, and found out that 1 percent of small business owners make $1 million or more--1 percent. For 99 percent of small business owners this is no tax increase, so it is not hurting job creators. It is creating jobs and that is what we need to do, and I cannot believe we are going to see this fail tomorrow again because we do not want millionaires to pay 70 cents out of every $100 more they make beyond $1 million, 70 cents in taxes. I think it is worth a lot more than 70 cents to get America back to work, and I think the sooner we do it, the better.
The Congressional Budget Office released a report that highlights the trend in household income between 1979 and 2007. As I mentioned earlier, American families, working families, have fallen further and further behind. The data showed that the top 1 percent of earners saw a dramatic increase in their share of household income. The remaining 99 percent were relatively unchanged.
The share of aftertax household income for the top 1 percent of the population more than doubled, climbing to 17 percent in 2007 from 8 percent in 1979. For the top 1 percent of household earners, the highest earners in America, average real aftertax household income grew by 275 percent between 1979 and 2000.
What happen to the others? The top quintiles were receiving 53 percent of aftertax household income in 2007, up from 43 percent in 1979. People in the lowest fifth of the population received about 5 percent of aftertax household income--that is 20 percent of the people receiving about 5 percent of aftertax household income in 2007, going down from 7 percent in 1979.
People in the middle? Three-fifths of the population saw their share of aftertax income decline by 2 to 3 percent in those years, 1979 to 2007.
If you wonder why people are sitting in tents in these ``occupy'' areas and why there is a rage across America, it has a lot to do with this. People are working hard, playing by the rules, and falling further and further behind. They are looking up at the top and saying, I don't understand this. Why is it that the bank CEOs are getting multimillion dollar bonuses and the management of my company is getting a dramatic increase, while they tell us we are the most productive workers in the world? It is understandable they want a fair shake, and it starts with putting people to work.
With 14 million people out of work today, getting them jobs where they can start paying taxes instead of drawing benefits is something they want and we should want. It is worth saying to the wealthiest in America, pay your fair share; maybe a little bit more than you did today. If it makes America a stronger nation and the economy stronger, my guess is those folks making over $1 million a year will prosper too. That has been the story of America. I am sure that story will be repeated.
The question tomorrow is whether there will be a single Republican vote to support us. I am not certain. I have to think back. I do not believe we have had one Republican vote supporting the President's jobs bill so far, any aspect of it. We are going to keep trying, and the American people expect us to.
The President spoke today at Key Bridge, right here between Arlington, VA, and DC, a bridge right near where I went to college and crossed hundreds of times. It is a bridge that needs some work and he was making that point, let's put Americans to work right there, creating good American jobs with this jobs bill. The President made a point of noting that while we are talking about passing a jobs bill in the Senate, the House of Representatives is talking about commemorative coins and reaffirming our belief in the phrase ``In God we trust.'' The President said in the speech there is no doubt in his mind that people do trust in God, they just don't trust in the House of Representatives to get the job done here, to pass a jobs bill that will get people back to work.
That is the challenge we face. That is the challenge America faces, and a bipartisan solution will serve the Nation well.
I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
The legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
Mr. UDALL of Colorado. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent the order for the quorum call be rescinded.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
Mr. UDALL of Colorado. Mr. President, I come to the floor tonight to discuss an issue I have addressed many times in this Chamber over the course of the past few years, and that is the urgent need for this Congress to come together to pass policies that will spur job creation in our country. I know the Presiding Officer, my colleague from Colorado, has done so in powerful ways himself. I want to talk specifically about the Rebuild America Jobs Act, legislation that is pending as I stand here and as you sit here for Senate debate.
We both know that the Rebuild America Jobs Act is one component of President Obama's comprehensive job creation package which he and the American people have been urging us in this Congress to pass. But my colleagues on the other side of the aisle, the Republicans, have uniformly filibustered the President's comprehensive job creation package, so we are now attempting to debate the package in smaller legislative pieces. This week we are attempting to begin debate on the Rebuild America Jobs Act, which would put hundreds of thousands of Americans back to work rebuilding our crumbling bridges, our roads, and our airports. It is an important bill. It is worthy of this Chamber's debate consideration. It should not be subject to another filibuster that leaves the American people wondering why the heck we cannot charter a path forward that would help create jobs and build our economy.
Before I specifically address what is in the Rebuild America Jobs Act, I thought it would be informative to briefly talk about how our economy got in the rough place it is in today. We are 3 years removed from a near global economic meltdown. If you think about it, in the final year of the Bush administration we lost nearly 4.5 million jobs. That is very significant. Our economy was bleeding over 800,000 jobs a month when President Obama was sworn in. Credit markets were frozen, job losses mounted, and there was real concern that we as a nation risked slipping into another Great Depression. The Presiding Officer remembers all too well, as we all do, the concerns and the dynamics that were present at that point.
Fortunately, President Obama took a leadership role and the Congress worked with him to take steps to avert a catastrophe. But we are left with an enormous hole we are trying to climb out of. Beginning in 2009, we slowed the economic free fall that we passed and we put an end to the great recession--at least on paper. The Presiding Officer knows that. But, as typical of any recession, let alone the great recession, job growth has trailed economic growth.
Under the President's leadership, in the last year and a half, the economy has added nearly 2 million jobs. We are nearly halfway restoring the jobs lost under the Bush recession. Yet with unemployment standing at 9.1 percent nationwide, we still have a long way to go.
As I mentioned at the beginning of my remarks, in order to speed up economic recovery and bring down this stubborn unemployment rate, the President presented to us a few months ago an ambitious job creation package called the American Jobs Act. The bill, which consisted of bipartisan proposals, as we well know, proposals that both parties had supported time and time again, ran into a wall of uncooperative partisanship in this Chamber and was grounded by a Republican filibuster.
Mr. President, you and I both adhere to the concept of bipartisanship, working with the other party, but this kind of obstructionism has become way too common in the modern Senate and it truly is getting in the way of our capacity, our desire to create jobs. I say that in a plain and simple way. It has put in jeopardy our future, frankly. We have to win a global economic race. We have traded the burden of governing--I should say also the responsibility of governing and legislating--for seemingly a set of ideological positions and gamesmanship, and you know and I know Coloradoans are flat out tired of it. They want their elected leaders to lead, to work across the aisle and produce some results that will help working Americans, will help small businesses.
I could not agree more with our citizens at home. I have to say that I think impartial observers would say with regularity, tea party interests in the Congress have taken our economy, have walked our economy, driven our economy to the edge of a cliff with the repeated threats of a government shutdown. If I could use the words of my colleague from Colorado: Can you imagine a city government leader allowing Denver, for example, to forfeit and default on its financial obligations? It would not happen. It feels as though we are creating in this Congress crises out of thin air, to rattle our economic markets.
You do not have to look back to August, to those dark days when the debate over the debt ceiling and then threat of default was an economic crisis completely of this element's own making. Then what followed? What was predicted to follow: Our credit was downgraded and it had economic effects.
I have been meeting with businesspeople this week who can give you example after example. I was a businessman in the private sector. My colleague from Colorado was. We know the Federal Government can only do so much to grow jobs and positively affect the economy. But when you have self-inflicted wounds, such as those that were produced in August, you are going to stifle recovery and you are going to create real business uncertainty in the private sector.
If we were serious about economic recovery, we would stop taking the Federal budget to the brink of disaster at every opportunity. I know there are people in this town who want to score points, but hard-
working Americans, hard-working Coloradoans, and our businesses ultimately pay the price for this kind of increased uncertainty. If we were serious about providing businesses, particularly small businesses, with the capital they need, we would look for opportunities to do so.
One of the ways I believe the Senate could help would be to consider and pass a bipartisan piece of legislation that I have introduced now in a series of Congresses that will double the amount of loans credit unions can offer to small businesses.
This would literally help tens of thousands of Americans. It would allow businesspeople to create jobs for hundreds of thousands of Americans and there would be no cost to the American taxpayer. This is a form of lifting a regulation. Credit unions are overly regulated and this simple change in the policy that applies to their access to the small business sector would make a difference.
Instead--and this pains me to say--what I hear from the other side of the aisle, what my Republican colleagues offer are proposals that rely almost entirely on attacking the administration or suggesting that we implement the failed policies that got us into this situation in the past. This is one area where the commonsense rules that protect our consumers and preserve our clean air and our clean water are designated as the problem. There is, frankly, scant evidence to support their regulatory boogeymen. They offer no hard evidence of these claims. I am convinced the constant drumbeat about regulations is more harmful to our country's job creation potential than the alleged effect of the regulations themselves.
In fact, a recent Bloomberg study noted that this administration has issued 5 percent fewer regulations than the Bush administration at the same juncture. Economic data shows that these regulations have a minor effect, if at all, on the economy. I have in hand studies that show the right kinds of regulations, particularly when it comes to protecting the public's health, that actually can create jobs. The Assistant Secretary of Economic Policy at the Department of the Treasury recently wrote: ``None of these data support the claim that regulatory uncertainty is holding back hiring.''
On the contrary, she found that a lack of demand in the market and global financial and economic conditions are the primary culprits for our slow recovery.
This jives with what we hear generally from business leaders who, by large margins, point to a lack of demand and uncertainty in the marketplace as the primary barriers to their businesses, not Federal regulation. What feeds this uncertainty and lack of demand is the constant political threats to send our economy off a cliff and the constant scare campaign that tells Americans to fear the Obama administration.
I am not unsympathetic to the plight of the regulated sectors of our economy. President Obama said it well. He said: ``We should have no more regulation than the health, safety, and security of the American people require,'' and we should make compliance with the ones we do have as easy as possible. I don't want to overstate this, but that is why I have taken steps to eliminate unnecessary Federal redtape, such as easing the cap on how much credit unions can loan to small businesses. But to constantly spread fear about our Government's work to provide oversight and protect clean air and clean water is a further uncertainty and worsen the lack of demand we see in the economy.
To break through this nonsense--and I don't use this word lightly--
this ``nonsense'' about the effect regulations are having, President Obama has offered a real path forward based on sound economics and bipartisan ideas. The Rebuild America Jobs Act was introduced yesterday. As I said, it is a part of the President's overall comprehensive approach. I hope we can move to debate this important infrastructure bill.
We are going to have a vote tomorrow morning, I believe, that would allow the Senate to move to actually debating the bill, and it would significantly and immediately boost job creation across the country. We would be able to ensure that we keep our roads and our bridges and other infrastructure safe, while investing in new projects that will stimulate businesses to invest and begin to create new, good-paying, American-based jobs, the type of jobs that cannot be shipped overseas. The American people, without question, overwhelmingly support the ideas in this projobs bill. It is all about investing in the future of hard-
working Americans and making sure they have the tools to achieve the American dream.
In Colorado alone, the investments for highway and transit projects in the bill are estimated to support the creation of at least 6,400 local jobs. We would accept those jobs in a minute. We know those people. We know the construction sector is one of the ones languishing in our State. These are trained, committed Coloradans who are dying to improve our State, to improve our infrastructure, to improve our economy. Why is that important beyond our State or beyond our country? We cannot compete if we do not have the infrastructure that allows commercial activity to thrive. That has been one of our competitive advantages for decades. Our competitors are not sitting back and waiting for us. They are investing in their infrastructure now. We don't have to go any further than China, India, Africa, South America. Those countries and continents are investing in their infrastructure.
What was heartening is that recently we have seen a great coalition, one that maybe we could mirror in the Congress, to support the President's proposal. That is the AFL-CIO, the leading labor organization in the United States that speaks for all the various unions across our country, allied with business interests such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. These are diverse interests. They are often at loggerheads. They have come together to urge us to pass such a measure that would build America.
The bill will not solve all our infrastructure challenges. It will not respond to every infrastructure opportunity we have. For example, we ought to reauthorize the Federal Aviation Administration. That is another less-than-valiant effort we made this year. As the Presiding Officer knows, we left in August with the FAA not funded and that cost us some economic growth. It put people out of work. Even for a week or two, that was too much time to be out of work. We ought to fully reauthorize the Federal Aviation Administration and in the process upgrade our national system of air travel.
I served in the House. I worked on the NextGen concept, which would upgrade the way in which we direct airplanes to travel across our country using satellite technology. Now we use radar technology. That is a 20th century technology. We need a 21st century technology. So let's pass a full authorization of the Federal Aviation Administration. We ought to pass a robust highway bill. For too long we have not had the full funding and full direction on a robust highway bill. I wish to applaud the bipartisan work that has gone into that. Senators Boxer, Inhofe, and Vitter have taken the first steps on a bipartisan proposal to do just that.
I note that many of my Republican colleagues object to the Rebuild America Jobs Act on the grounds that we would pay for it with additional revenue from those who make annually more than $1 million. I wish to point out that the American people disagree with them. Polls show close to 70 percent of Americans support offsetting the costs of the bill--because we are going to pay for this. We heard that message loudly and clearly; that those who make over $1 million a year could help shoulder more of the burden. I know I talked to people who have done quite well at home in Colorado who are willing to make that kind of investment if they see the return on the investment. The American people are ahead of us on this. They know it is a matter of simple fairness.
If I were in an ideal world--therefore, I am running the show--I would make some changes to the bill to address our broader infrastructure challenges. I would fold in the FAA; I would fold in the highway bill I mentioned. But let's take the first modest step. Let's open the floor of the Senate to debate on the Rebuild America Jobs Act just like the American Jobs Act more generally. We could discuss how to pay for it and what are the best mechanisms. Perhaps there is another way to pay for it, but let's begin the process.
I wish to close by focusing on our home State of Colorado. I return home, as the Chair does, almost every weekend and take the time to hear out my fellow citizens and those who hired me to represent them in the Senate. They will briefly complain about our inability to get things done, as we know, even the simplest things it seems like this year. I know my colleagues have similar experiences. But they quickly move to what they are doing at home and how they are making their lives better. I get energized by their commitment to working in their own communities. The other thing I don't hear much at home is a litmus test as to what political party we are a member of or what their concerns are about who is up for reelection next year. They come together all across our State, in Alamosa and Durango and Grand Junction, Sterling, and the list goes on and on of communities that come together. That isn't to say there isn't disagreement or that the solution comes easy, but they don't deal in the kind of partisan bickering that has become so common here.
I know the Presiding Officer feels that sense of possibility at home. So let's match that sense of possibility. Let's match their energy. We can take some heart from the fact that our economy is beginning to show some signs of improvement.
The Department of Commerce report showed a 2.5-percent growth in Gross Domestic Product. That is welcomed news and signals that we are slowly making progress. I want to underline unemployment remains stubbornly, maddeningly high at 9.1 percent. We must do better. I hope we can start by a minimum voting tomorrow to at least debate the Rebuild America Jobs Act.
Let's end the filibusters, particularly when it comes to starting a debate. Literally, we are not even going to debate this bill. If we were to open the debate tomorrow, in a few days' time, we would have to have an additional cloture vote to end debate on the vote itself. If the minority and my Republican colleagues don't want to move to end debate, they certainly have that option at that time.
Let's keep faith with the description of the Senate, which was one of my motivations for wanting to represent Coloradans here, which is the most deliberative legislative body in the world. If we are the Chamber that many look to for debate, for time spent to understand the best policies for the country, let's keep faith with that. Let's keep faith with our obligations as Senators. So the time for filibusters is over. Let's go to work on behalf of the American people.
I remain optimistic. I think we can bring forth creativity and a sense of cooperation. That is what we see at home. That is what happens in Colorado. That is what happens in all the States that are represented here. That is the American way. Let's bring the American way to the Senate and put Americans back to work.
I thank the Chair for his patience, his interest, his partnership, his service to the State of Colorado and the United States itself.
I yield the floor and note the absence of a quorum.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
The legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
Mr. REID. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
Mr. REID. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that on Thursday, November 3, 2011, when the Senate resumes consideration of the motion to proceed to S. 1769, the Rebuild America Jobs Act, it be in order for the Republican leader or his designee to move to proceed to S. 1786; that the motions to proceed be debated concurrently, with the time until 3 p.m. equally divided between the two leaders or their designees prior to votes on the motions to proceed in the following order: Reid motion to proceed to S. 1769 and McConnell or designee motion to proceed to S. 1786; that the motions to proceed each be subject to a 60-affirmative-vote threshold; that if the Reid motion to proceed is agreed to, the vote on the McConnell or designee motion to proceed be delayed until disposition of S. 1769; finally, that the cloture motion with respect to the motion to proceed to S. 1769 be vitiated.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
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