3% Withholding Repeal and Job Creation Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I am going to replace the Presiding Officer in the chair in a few moments, but before that, I wished to come to the floor and talk about our economy and some work this Congress needs to be engaged in if we are going to get things moving on the right track again.

Today, the stock market plunged 400 points because of concerns that are going on in Europe, especially with Italy. It is a debt crisis that has been on the front page of every newspaper around the globe for weeks and in some cases months.

I am reminded of the discussion we had over the summer that consumed the Congress for an entire summer, about the lifting of the debt ceiling. Article after article after article said that if the Congress couldn't figure out how to work this out in a bipartisan way and make a material difference in the trajectory of our deficit and our debt that, for the first time, our credit rating would be downgraded. For the first time in the history of the United States of America, the full faith and credit of the United States would be called into question.

That was on the front page of every newspaper for weeks. In the end, we stumbled across that finish line, and in the end our debt was downgraded. I would argue we are about to face the same thing again and have the chance again to do the right thing--to act in a bipartisan way, to create a thoughtful approach to our debt and our deficit that allows us to continue to invest in our economy.

Families in Colorado, much as the families in Rhode Island, are struggling in an economy that is the worst since the Great Depression. We are coming out of it now, but there are significant structural issues in that economy. I have shown this chart before. There are four simple lines. The blue one is the productivity index, which shows our economy has actually gotten substantially more productive since the early 1990s, substantially more productive during this recession for a variety of reasons. One reason is that our companies have had to learn to compete with the rest of the world in a way they have not before, so they became more efficient. The benefits technology has brought has driven up this curve. Unfortunately for our workers but understandably for our businesses, they have had to figure out how to get through this recession with fewer people so they can get through to the other side.

The second curve is our gross domestic product, the size of our domestic economy, and it is not where it was before the recession, but it is headed back there.

The other two lines are the unemployment level, which this chart says is 14 million people, but I think the number is closer to 25 million, when we consider who has stopped looking for work and when we consider who is underemployed in this economy. Then this line is a tragedy for our families, which is falling median family income.

This chart--it is a little hard to read--is a pretty good depiction of what is happening. This red line represents the bottom 90 percent of income earners in this country. Think about that. We are talking about the bottom 90 percent. That is everyone, except for 10 percent. It shows the share of the income in the United States that they are earning. It starts out here in the 1920s and goes to today, where the bottom 90 percent are earning roughly 47 percent of the income. The last time that was true, by the way, was 1928, the year before the Great Depression and the market crash. The top .1 percent earns 10 percent of the economy--.1, not 1 percent--.1. The last time that was true was 1928. All through the productive times in the 20th century, the 1950s and the 1960s and the 1970s, there wasn't that kind of imbalance in our economy. This group earned roughly--90 percent earned roughly 70 percent of the economy and everybody else earned a fair share of the economy, and the economy grew and we were able to build for the future.

Those are structural issues in the economy we can help with, we can work together to fix, but what we have to do right now is avert predictable crises that are within our control so we don't make matters worse.

Sometimes when I travel, people don't know why we need to worry about what is going on in Europe. This afternoon I wanted to bring a chart that shows the soaring debt of all these European economies and the United States. We are the blue line here. This is Greece up here. Everybody is in tough shape. Everybody has made promises they can't keep. Everybody has levered up in a way that isn't sustainable. But what is also true is that we are all interrelated. If something bad happens in Europe, something very bad is going to happen here, just as when the capital markets fell apart at the beginning of the last recession.

This chart shows how dependent our economy is on exports to Europe. Between one-fifth and one-sixth of the total value of our exports goes to Europe. If the European banks

fail, if the governments can't pay back their debt and the economy comes to a screeching halt in Europe, they are not going to buy our exports. Those are American jobs we need to worry about. Those are American jobs we need to defend and protect and we need to understand this relationship.

Look at the exposure of our U.S. banks to Europe. This red part is the euro area. It is 29 percent of the total international exposure of our banks, with 23 percent to the U.K. More than half of the foreign exposure of our banks is European debt.

We were unable to come to a rational conclusion on the debt ceiling. So the Congress punted this decision to a supercommittee and asked them to please help us make the decision. My own hope is that the supercommittee takes a page out of the bipartisan proposals that were reached--the one that was led by Bowles and Simpson, the one by Rivlin and Domenici. I think the details are less important, frankly, than the size, but that takes $4 trillion out over the next 10 years, a balance of cuts to revenue of roughly 3 to 1, that sends a message to the world that the United States is serious about dealing with its fiscal matters. If we don't do that in advance of this European crisis that is on the front page of every newspaper in the country, I can assure my colleagues that the choices we have in front of us will be even tougher than they would have otherwise been.

Sometimes I get the feeling that people around here actually don't think the American people are watching this screaming match, are watching the disagreements, are watching the political games, but they are. They know exactly what is going on here, and they understand the seriousness of these issues because they are living through that economy I spoke of earlier. That is what they are worrying about. They are making less today than they were 10 years ago. They are making the same amount they were making 20 years ago. They can't afford to send their kid to college. They can't afford their health care, and they would like us to help straighten that out, but at a minimum they would like us to prevent matters from getting worse. They would like to see us work together.

Some people here think Congress has always been unpopular, that it is just as an institution an unpopular place. Not so. Look at this. Here is Congress's approval rating today: 9 percent. That is a pretty catastrophic fall-off in the last 10 years, and I would argue it has an awful lot to do with our inability to address problems the way people in their local communities are doing. There is not a mayor in Colorado who would threaten the credit rating of their community for politics--not one. Not a Republican mayor, not a Democratic mayor, not a tea party mayor, not one would imagine doing it for a second because people in our communities would know that all that would do would be to drive up our interest rates, make us spend more money on interest and less on infrastructure,

more on interest and less on education, more on interest and less on the health and welfare of our citizens.

We know that at the local level, but somehow here we get to color outside the lines. We are now at 9 percent, which is almost at the margin of error for zero. We did some research to find out what else is at 9 percent. We could not find virtually anything in public polls taken all across this country. My goodness, the Internal Revenue Service has a 40-percent approval rating compared the our 9 percent. BP had a 16-percent approval rating at the height of the oilspill, and we are at 9 percent. There is an actress who is at 15 percent. More people support the United States becoming communist--I do not, for the record--at 11 percent than approve of the job we are doing. I guess we can take some comfort that Fidel Castro is at 5 percent.

Look, we are suffering--and when I say ``we,'' I mean families across this country--through the worst recession since the Great Depression. We can see on the front page of every single newspaper what the stakes are here if we do not act in a comprehensive way on our debt and our deficit. We know that both parties have different approaches to the challenges we face. But at the end of the day, these challenges are the challenges of the American people, not the challenges of a bunch of politicians in Washington who are worrying about the next election.

My hope is the supercommittee shows leadership here, that it gives the opportunity for every Member of this body to express their leadership here, and that all of us are able to go home to red parts of our State and blue parts of our State and say to the people: We saw the problem coming, and we led the world. We materially addressed the problem we faced. We acted in a bipartisan way. We came up with a plan that said: Do you know what. We are all in this together for the benefit of our kids and our grandkids, for the people who are suffering through this economy.

There is $2.3 trillion of cash sitting on companies' balance sheets in the United States of America tonight that is not being invested because no one knows what interest rate environment they are going to be in because they do not know what Washington is going to do. We shattered confidence in this economy this summer. We should not do it again.

This is a popular number, this 9 percent, these days, you may have noticed, on the Presidential campaign trail. It is not a popular number for the American people: 9-percent approval. Let's do something right here, and let's drive these numbers back up, and let's restore confidence in the American people.

With that, Mr. President, I thank you for your patience and yield the floor.

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Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I want to take just a few minutes to talk about Veterans Day and important work already going on in Colorado to support our returning servicemembers and their families.

This Friday, Veterans Day holds special significance. America's part in the war in Iraq is coming to a close this year, and we have started drawing down combat troops in Afghanistan. In Colorado, that is going to mean about 400 Fort Carson soldiers will come home from Iraq in December alone.

Many of the bravest 1 percent of Americans who shoulder 100 percent of the responsibility of keeping our country safe will be coming home all across the country. As these servicemembers return to their families and many transition to civilian life, we need to make sure we are ready to make good on the promises we have made.

I asked leaders from the Colorado veterans community to make recommendations for how to make Colorado the best State for veterans and military families to live and work. After months of thoughtful conversation, they produced a comprehensive report called ``Better Serving Those Who Have Served'' that offers solutions on how to address the challenges facing America's veterans. A key part of this report is a new proposal to create a National Veterans Foundation, modeled after work being done in Colorado Springs that enabled public and private agencies to better collaborate to support veterans and military families. This week, I will introduce a bill to bring that Colorado-based innovation to the rest of the country. The bill would create a congressionally chartered National Veterans Foundation to support communities attempting to work on a blueprint model like Colorado Springs. The foundation would help fill gaps in services to veterans by helping communities align and leverage their resources.

I have also joined Senator Tester and the Presiding Officer and cosponsored the VOW to Hire Heroes Act. The VOW to Hire Heroes Act does much to help veterans find good-paying jobs, including providing significant tax incentives to businesses that hire veterans. The Senate will likely be voting on this important legislation tomorrow, and I urge colleagues to support its passage.

Before I sit down, I wanted to mention that 2 weeks, maybe 3 weeks ago, I was down in Colorado Springs visiting Fort Carson, and I went to see an elementary school on the post. As a former school superintendent, I have spent a lot of time over the years in schools and tend to want to be there when the children are there so that you can actually get a sense of whether there is any learning going on.

This meeting was different because it was a meeting after school, after the children had gone home. Ninety percent of them live on the post. Their entire lives have been defined by these two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Their entire lives have been defined by the deployment of one parent--in some cases two parents--who have served two or three or four tours of duty on behalf of this country in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Thousands of our troops are going to be coming home over the next year. I think we need to be asking ourselves whether we really are ready to honor the commitments and promises we have made.

As others have said tonight, when we are coming out of what is the worst economic calamity we have faced since the Great Depression, we need to make sure we are doing absolutely everything we can for these veterans but also for the people who are the moms and dads, the children at elementary schools just like the one I visited, all across the country.

The children in this school, according to the teachers with whom I met, have faced extraordinary challenges at home as a result of all this. It is another example of the work we should be doing together here in a bipartisan way as we ask people to serve their country in these foreign wars.

I continue to hope at some point there is going to be a breakthrough here and we are going to get past the partisan cartoon we have confronted for the entire time I have been in the Senate and get back to the work of the American people and get back to the work that will support the children in that elementary school at Fort Carson. I want to say on this floor and for this record how grateful I am to their teachers for teaching but also for giving their Senator an insight into the lives of the young people they are serving.

Mr. President, I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.

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