Acting Secretary of Commerce Rebecca Blank Remarks at the Greater Fort Lauderdale Alliance Annual Meeting, Fort Lauderdale, Florida Good evening, everyone. Thank you for coming.
And thank you, Bob, for that warm welcome. It’s great to be in Fort Lauderdale.
I’m here tonight to talk a little bit about the President’s Jobs Act. But before I get to that, I think it’s important to talk about where the economy is today.
Understanding where we are and how we got there, tells us something about what we need to do next.
For many Americans, I imagine it seemed like we were doing OK in this century’s first decade. In a few respects we were. Some folks made a lot of money.
The problem was how few shared in the prosperity and that much of the wealth came from unsustainable bubbles in the financial and housing markets.
Job growth in the 2000s, in fact, was the lowest of any decade stretching back to the 1940s. That's true even if you stopped measuring at the end of 2007, before the recession started. Meanwhile, wages for middle class Americans stalled, while health care and tuition costs just kept going up.
In short, the seeds of today’s economic problems were there. We just didn’t see them very clearly.
You can point to a lot of reasons why this happened, but fundamentally, the problem is that America lost sight of its true economic strengths.
In fact, one recent study found that no advanced industrialized economy did less over the last decade to improve its economic competitiveness than the United States.
So, in 2007, when those bubbles started to burst, creating a financial crisis that spread around world, we weren’t in a position to recover quickly.
Americans, confronted with falling home prices and mountains of debt, did exactly what you’d expect. They stopped spending – not exactly good for business. Instead, they started saving and worked to rebalance their household finances.
For many in the U.S., common sense probably seemed to dictate that the government should immediately do the same.
Well, not really. As most of you in this room know, during an economic recession, when consumers and businesses stop buying, that’s when government has to intervene. In essence, by taking government action, we bet on the resiliency of the American people – and American businesses – and helped create demand to give the economy a little breathing room while it recovered.
Failure to do that – failure to act – can turn a terrible recession into a Great Depression. That’s a fact.
So in the first days of this Administration, we took a number of important steps, many of them politically unpopular, to stabilize the financial system, to keep the American automobile industry from going bankrupt and to pass along a tax cut to middle class families so that they had a little bit more to spend in your stores and communities every month.
With the Recovery Act, we also shored up the bottom line of America’s cities and states so that teachers and policemen could keep their jobs, and we made major investments in our roads and railways to put people to work. We did precisely what we knew would stop the free fall.
But here – here’s where things got a little weird. We suddenly started getting accused of being anti-business.
Now, I don’t want to make any of your feel uncomfortable with these next words, but I think we need to talk about our relationship.
And by “our relationship,” I mean between this administration and the business community.
Look, politics is tough. Everyone knows that. To paraphrase Jon Stewart, if Barack Obama made it rain cookies, there are some people out there who would accuse him of causing a milk shortage.
That’s life. There were people on the other side of the political spectrum, who felt the same way about George Bush.
Still, it’s puzzling to me that in some quarters there’s a genuine belief that this administration has doubts about American free enterprise.
I don’t get that.
Since we took office, we’ve passed 17 different tax cuts for small businesses, the largest temporary investment incentive for manufacturers in the history of the United States and a payroll tax cut that put more money in the pockets of Florida workers.
At the same time, we’ve worked hard on the things that contributed to long-term American competitiveness: Better schools and support for innovation and infrastructure.
Source: U.S. Department of Commerce
