David Price: “Absolutely. That is money down a rat hole as the gentleman very convincingly, maybe did not use quite those elegant…”

“Absolutely. That is money down a rat hole as the gentleman very convincingly, maybe did not use quite those elegant terms, but that is what the gentleman said earlier. That is money anybody in this body could think of better public and private uses for than simply interest on the national debt. So the economy is in sad shape, and we are getting the worst of both worlds. We are not getting an economic stimulus that is anything like what we should be getting, and yet we are over the cliff fiscally. We are undergoing a fiscal reversal that will take us and our children decades to grow out of. The unemployment numbers are graphically demonstrated here. The unemployment rate now from a very, very low figure in early 2001, now up in the range of 6 percent, hovering here for months now, and there are a few scattered economic indicators that are looking somewhat better, but the term 'jobless recovery' has entered the lexicon because there certainly are not many jobs being produced. What I heard at my district at every meeting I had in August was that this is not just an abstract economist estimate. This is something that is affecting the real lives of real people. They are nearing desperation, and this actually underestimates the problem because there are many, many people who have good training, good experience, and yet they are taking lower-end jobs now that really cut their standard of living.”