On the recordOctober 5, 2011
There has been a lot of discussion in the 1-minutes this morning about the importance of passing the Obama jobs bill. I would like to remind everyone today that the bailouts, the stimulus packages, all have exceeded $2 trillion in the spending of taxpayer money. And despite the expenditure of all of that money, the unemployment rate in America is still well over 9 percent, even though it was suggested that with the spending of the stimulus money, unemployment would be brought down to less than 8 percent. I would also remind everyone that within the last 3 days, the Department of Energy shoved out the door approximately $5 billion in loan guarantees for so-called green energy projects without, in my view, the necessary time to clearly evaluate the loans that were being made. And we have proof of this because, in the Solyndra case, the taxpayers are going to have to expend $538 million because that company went bankrupt. Now in the Obama jobs bill, they're asking for another approximately $500 billion to be spent to create jobs. Well, the reason that we're here today is that if you talk to any businesspeople today, large or small, they will tell you that the reason jobs are not being created in America is because of uncertainty, the uncertainty about health care regulations, not knowing what they're going to be. Already, 8,700 pages of new regulations have been written.…
