Mr. President, this debate today is all about jobs. The House Republican budget which we will soon be voting on in this body will destroy 700,000 American jobs. That is the estimate put forward by Mark Zandi, who advised John McCain's Presidential campaign and now works for the nonpartisan Moody's Group. That sort of estimate is not just a voice in the wilderness, it is repeated by major group after major group. Ben Bernanke, Chairman of the Fed, said last week the plan would cost ``a couple hundred thousand jobs.'' Goldman Sachs analyst Alec Phillips put forth an estimate that said ``this House job-killing plan will reduce, in the second and third quarters of the next year, the economy of the United States by 1.5 to 2 percentage points.'' What is 2 percent of a $15 trillion economy? It is $300 billion. Whether you view it in terms of the gross domestic product or you view it in terms of the number of jobs of Americans taken away by the job-killing Republican plan, this bill, H.R. 1, that we will be voting on later today, is a disaster. I want us to focus on this number because I can tell you, folks back home in Oregon want to create jobs. They want us to put America back to work. They don't want to have a plan put forward that continues to pay enormous bonuses to the billionaires of Wall Street and creates enormous special tax bonuses for the billionaires who are making their tax returns while taking out this huge economic meltdown on working people.…
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