Steve Cohen: “Indeed, it's been 1 year since the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act passed without a Republican vote in this House…”

“Indeed, it's been 1 year since the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act passed without a Republican vote in this House and maybe only one in the Senate, and we've heard a lot of vitriol here today about it. The fact is almost every economist, including Mark Zandy who advised the Republican candidate for President, have said it helped. It helped in a major way our country from falling off a precipice into another Great Depression. A difficult vote, but a needed vote. And 95 percent of Americans received tax breaks, things that the other side of the aisle normally is much in favor of, but for 95 percent of America they didn't care and they didn't vote for it. The fact is there were three-quarters of a million jobs lost in the last quarter of President Bush's administration; in the last quarter of President Obama, there were just 35,000. The stock market has gone up by 50 percent since President Obama came into office and the jobs stimulus program was passed. There has been improvement. We had a great crisis, and we were in a ditch, and we are digging our way out, but we are only doing it in one part of the House. We need to work together in a bipartisan measure for jobs.”