Peter Roskam: “Mr. Speaker, this bill comes in at a svelte $54 billion of a budget bust, and I found it ironic that the chairman of the…”

“Mr. Speaker, this bill comes in at a svelte $54 billion of a budget bust, and I found it ironic that the chairman of the committee and the former chairman of the committee have talked about this in the context of job creation. Even Mr. Van Hollen from Maryland said it was going to be supported by entrepreneurs. But let's look carefully and quickly at what the job creators are saying about this bill. The United States Chamber of Commerce says it will hinder job creation. The Business Roundtable says it takes us two steps backwards in terms of job creating. The National Association of Manufacturing says it will threaten job creation, U.S. competitiveness, and overall economic growth. IBM says these tax increases will completely overwhelm any positive economic impact of the R&D tax credit. And the technology leaders of our nation, that is, the Silicon Valley Leadership Group, says that these offsets are going to be done at the expense of U.S. job creation. Look, this is a cascading disappointment. This is a majority that has become absolutely blind to the realities of the stimulus. With all due respect to one of the chairmen of the committee who spoke a couple of minutes ago, having a straight face and arguing that the stimulus has been a success is not persuasive in my district. My district was promised unemployment was going to peak at 8 percent if we spent the $1 trillion. Employment in Illinois is now at 11\1/2\ percent.”