Ed Perlmutter: “I'd like first to respond to my friend from North Carolina when she was making complaints about the States and the…”

“I'd like first to respond to my friend from North Carolina when she was making complaints about the States and the States should stand on their own. Generally I would agree with that. The trouble is we're in some unprecedented times. In Colorado, for instance, our economy was humming along. We were doing very well. And in the last 3 months, we've seen things really come to a halt in many ways, and job losses have been mounting. This is the same thing that is occurring across the country. And unless we jolt this economy back moving in the right direction, we're going to have greater and greater trouble for a longer and longer period of time. And I would just point, as my good friend knows, to an economist named Mark Zandi--who was the consultant and adviser to Senator McCain--in a report that he gave to people on January 21, 2009, about the importance of moving a major piece of legislation like this forward so that we develop jobs across this country. And the proposal that the Republicans had put forth, instead of 3.5 million jobs, was only going to create 1.3 million jobs. And it was based only on tax cuts, which is sort of what we heard through the last 8 years: Let's cut taxes, let's prosecute a war in Iraq, let's turn this country's finances upside down. It's time to change the direction of this Nation. That's what we're doing with this bill. We want to get it going again.”