On the recordMarch 19, 2013
I yield myself such time as I may consume. The President has been crystal clear. His top priority is to grow the economy, to put more Americans back to work, to strengthen the middle class, to have rising middle class wages and upward mobility in this country. By attacking the jobs deficit, we can also bring down the budget deficit because we know from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office that more than half of our deficit this year is due to the fact that you still have a lot of people out of work who are looking for work, which is why it's so counterproductive to adopt the approach that our Republican colleagues do. By not replacing the sequester, the Congressional Budget Office tells us we will lose hundreds of thousands of jobs just by the end of this calendar year, and those jobs are the most important things to be available to help strengthen the middle class and lift people out of poverty. But in lifting people out of poverty, it's also important to provide a little bit of support that they can stand on as they climb that ladder of opportunity. Unfortunately, this budget cuts into a lot of those legs on that stool of support, and nobody understands this issue better than our colleague. So she may respond, I yield 30 seconds to the gentlelady from California (Ms. Lee). {time} 1900
