American Jobs Act

Floor Speech

Mr. COHEN. Thank you, and I appreciate your leading this hour.

Just last week, the President stood just behind where you're standing and addressed this Congress--bipartisan, bicameral, Senators and House Members--and laid out a plan to fix this economy. Pass this bill, he said. And we need to pass the bill. The President and his team have put a lot of work into it. People want jobs. They want to work.

In my district, there are more unemployed. Every weekend when I go out in my district, people come up to me and tell me they are either looking for a job, have lost their job and are looking for a job. We need to find ways to put those people to work. We are working on ways to make schools better. Building infrastructure which is so important to Memphis, Tennessee, where we have rails, roads, rivers, and runways, the distribution center of America, is so important. And if you put the money in infrastructure, which this plan plans on, Make It In America, if you do infrastructure, it's got to be made in America. You can't export those jobs overseas, and you put people to work immediately. What they are building are avenues that make commerce move and work.

Federal Express moves more packages around the world than any other American company, and Memphis International Airport is the largest American cargo airport in the world. We create jobs by putting money into infrastructure. Teachers, policemen, and firefighters, 3 million kept their jobs because of the recovery bill that we passed that did successfully help this country stay out of a great depression.

Sometimes, Mr. Garamendi, I'm amazed at the rhetoric that you hear from some people, particularly from the other side, who blithely tell people that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act was $770 billion that didn't make a difference. The fact is that 40 percent of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, so as to pass the Senate where we needed Senator Collins' and Senator Snowe's votes, were the Republican endorsed and loved tax cuts. How can they talk out of both sides of their mouth and say that a bill, 40 percent of which--which means over $300 billion of tax

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cuts--didn't do any good, because now all they talk about is tax cuts.

But when the President of the United States proposes and the Congress with him in a bipartisan effort passes tax cuts--and I'm not sure that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act was bipartisan. That was strictly Democrats. But when we passed tax cuts with a few Republicans in the Senate, in their minds, it didn't create any jobs. But when they propose tax cuts, this is Christopher Columbus' new way to find the New World. Well, it's hypocritical.

We need to support our President because he is the President. There isn't a red America and a blue America. There is, as he said in his speech at the 2004 Democratic Convention, the United States of America. People need to understand that. We need to be here for that red, white, and blue flag, for this country, to put this country back to work, to keep it as the most competitive country in the world so we don't fall behind China and India in engineering and science, and coming up with programs that give our children an opportunity to be able to fill the jobs of the 21st century--the green jobs that the President has proposed that are the jobs of the 21st century, and the technology jobs that we haven't done a good enough job in filling, giving money to colleges to do the research for industry to create jobs.

In our caucus yesterday, we had Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize winning economist. I read Krugman a lot, a Nobel Prize winning economist. Both say basically the same thing: The austerity programs proposed by the other side don't work. They've used them in Japan; didn't work. Greece, England, didn't work--unless you're in the upper 1 percent. If you wear a crown and you're the queen or the prince or the leaders of whatever, it works. But in this country, we don't have that kind of royalty, but we're starting to have a separate society with the upper 1 percent who the Republican Party won't raise their taxes no matter what, and the rest.

The President is right. We need to think about the whole country. We need to come together as a United States of America, not a red, a blue, a Democrat or Republican, and create jobs. The President's plan, over half of it, is tax cuts.

Our colleagues on the other side of the aisle say we can go for what we like there even though they said it didn't work when the President and the Democrats passed it in the Recovery Act, but they can't go for the infrastructure jobs that, of course, help businesses--trucking businesses, the airline industry, and the transportation industry. Automobiles and trucks have to have highways. So we need to pass this.

I support the President. I took an oath to do what I could to make this country better. We need to come together now because this is a crisis time.

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