On the recordDecember 3, 2010
Mr. President, I come to the Senate floor this morning to urge my colleagues--all of us--to move very quickly to pass tax relief for middle-income Americans. We have a crisis in this country: a crisis of jobs, a crisis of income for middle-class families. One of the ironies is I was here in 2001 when the Bush tax cuts were proposed. One of the major premises of those tax cuts was, well, this is going to free up the engine of job creation. It is going to result in such economic growth that our surplus--and at that time we had a surplus--is going to be sustained, if not increased. The record is that we have seen the worst private sector job creation in this decade since pre-World War II. We have seen the incomes of middle-class Americans stagnate, while we have seen the incomes of the very richest expand dramatically.
