We are also sitting on 8 straight years of uninterrupted job growth, roughly 22 million jobs in 8 years.

And we have made significant progress since entering the worst recession since the Great Depression.

Mr. Secretary when you left your first tour of duty in the White House in 2001, we were paying down our debt to the tune of a couple hundred billion dollars a year, and were on track to pay our debt down to zero by roughly 2008.

However, it seems to me that the rate at which these have been coming out is sort of erratic.

So if you look at the fact that the party that was responsible for running up all the red bar graphs was, in fact, removed from power, I think there is accountability.

I think if anybody needs to be brought to task, it is perhaps the Congress of the United States and this committee for not doing its oversight responsibility.

I would also remind Members on both sides of the aisle that during the last Republican default crisis, family net worth dropped by $2.4 trillion.

We should have 10,000 times more hearings on the incompetent management of our economy that led to the $16 trillion drop in household net worth.

And many of us believe that the specter of default on sovereign debt should never happen, it is unthinkable.

I believe that it is intellectually dishonest to believe that the Federal Government would not and should not step in following another large-scale terrorist attack.

A failure to extend this program is unacceptable.