On the recordMarch 28, 2012
I thank the chairman. I want to close where the gentlelady began, which is on the economy and on jobs. As this chart shows, when President Obama was sworn in, we were losing over 800,000 jobs a month. But because of actions taken by the President and the Congress and because of the tenacity of the American people and small businesses, we were able to stop the free fall and begin to climb out of that hole. {time} 1930 We are now at 24 consecutive months of positive private sector job growth. There were close to 4 million jobs created in that period. We need to sustain that recovery, not put the brakes on it. The Republican proposal unfortunately puts the brakes on it. I'll give you just one example. Next year they would cut our investment in transportation in their budget by 46 percent when we have about 17 percent unemployment in the construction industry. That's putting the brakes on. We hear from our colleagues that the only way to deal with the budget deficits is to cut, cut, cut. We propose a balanced approach. We do ask that we close some of those tax loopholes. We do ask that folks making a million dollars a year go back to paying the rates that they were in the Clinton administration. Let's see what happened in the economy back then. What this shows is during the Clinton years, 20.8 million jobs were created. After President Bush took office, they lowered the tax rates. There was a net of 653,000 jobs lost.…
