"I cannot believe he can spout such hyperbole with a straight face."
...can say it based on the impact of his policies.
Senator Franken: The importance of the Reocovery Act M. President, I rise today to discuss something I regret. I regret that Democrats have allowed the word "stimulus" to become a dirty word, one we avoid using. The President spoke a few weeks ago about his new plan to invest $50 billion in new infrastructure-projects that will improve safety and transportation. But he never once mentioned the words "stimulus" or "recovery." And that was probably a smart move on his part. Because frankly, the stimulus has gotten a bad rap. But this is a reputation that it absolutely does not deserve.
There are members of this body who opposed the Recovery Act because they thought it wouldn't work. It didn't jibe with their theory of economics, or how the government should address recessions. And that's fine. They were entitled to vote the way they thought best. But now, a year and a half later, we've been able to see the economic effects of the Recovery Act. And to deny that it has been a success is simply ignoring the data.
A recent poll showed that a majority of Americans believe that the stimulus bill either did nothing to help the economy, or made it even worse. The economic data, however, indicate otherwise. How do we explain this disparity between what people believe and what the data support?
Members of the American public don't form opinions out of thin air. They engage themselves-they watch the news, they listen to speeches by elected officials. And one would expect that watching the news and listening to your elected officials would be a decent way to form an opinion about something. But unfortunately, the talking heads on the news shows, along with many elected officials, having been feeding the American public half-truths about the Recovery Act. And that, frankly, is cheating the American people out of the facts.
Today I'd like to go through some of these claims made by the talking heads and elected officials, and then follow it up with some data. And that way the American people can use the facts to decide for themselves.
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Another vital component of the Recovery Act that is often overlooked is its expanded funding for unemployment insurance that helped keep 3.3 million people, including 1 million children, out of poverty in 2009. Another overlooked but critical program in the Recovery Act is the funding for Head Start. The $2 billion allocation preserved Head Start and Early Head Start programming for 64,000 children across the country-over 900 in Minnesota alone. These programs are helping the most vulnerable kids in our communities.
It's simple-economic analysis suggests that the Recovery Act boosted demand, created millions of jobs, kept families in their homes, and helped the economy start growing again.
Let me tell you what I love about being a Senator. As opposed to being a candidate for Senate. I think most of my colleagues can relate to this. When you're a candidate, you're speaking mainly to your own party. When you're trying to get the nomination, when you're getting out the vote. But as a Senator, you talk to everyone. I travel all over the state of Minnesota and meet with mayors and city council members, and county commissioners, and small businesses.
And everywhere I go, they thank me for the Recovery Act. They thank me for the teachers and firefighters, for the Workforce Investment Act funds, which they used to train people for jobs. For the highway extension or the wastewater plant or the funds for rural broadband or for weatherization of public buildings.
In fact, Michael Gunwald, writing for Time Magazine, said this: "the Recovery Act is the most ambitious energy legislation in history, converting the Energy Department into the world's largest venture-capital fund. It's pouring $90 billion into clean energy, including unprecedented investments in a smart grid; energy efficiency; electric cars; renewable power from the sun, wind and earth; cleaner coal; advanced biofuels; and factories to manufacture green stuff in the U.S. The act will also triple the number of smart electric meters in our homes, quadruple the number of hybrids in the federal auto fleet and finance far-out energy research through a new government incubator modeled after the Pentagon agency that fathered the Internet."
A few weeks ago I heard a prominent conservative talking head on one of the Sunday news shows describe the Recovery Act this way. He said:
If I pay my neighbor $1,000 to dig a hole in my backyard and fill it up again and he pays me $1,000 to dig a hole in his backyard and fill it up again, according to the national income statistics, that's a $2,000 increment to GDP and two jobs have been created. The American people understand, however, there's no real wealth created in this kind of transfer payment.
How out of touch. How downright offensive. And yet this is why so many Americans believe that the Recovery Act hasn't created any jobs or just created jobs for bureaucrats.
You know, I worry that my speech today is too little, too late. I worry that many Americans have already formed their opinion about the Recovery Act-based on the inaccuracies they hear from beltway pundits or from their elected officials.
But, I challenge the talking heads and the elected officials to find the Spencers, Sheilas, Cecils, and Randys in their state-go out and watch them work. Or talk to a teacher in the classroom or a cop on the beat. They're not digging and filling holes in their neighbors' backyards. They're doing skilled, hard, necessary work-rebuilding our roads, teaching our kids-and getting paid for it. With their paychecks, they buy food for their families-which generates more demand. And that's an economic recovery in the making.
Obama's tax cuts have been
mostly for low- and middle income Americans<...>
President Obama’s tax cuts versus President Bush’s tax cuts
President Bush enacted his tax cuts in 2001 and 2003, and over their 10-year lifespan, they reduced tax revenues by around $2.4 trillion, with $474 billion of that coming in the first four years. The first-term impact of those tax cuts is equivalent to about $574 billion in today’s dollars, or about 1.1 percent of gross domestic product.
President Obama has also signed two major pieces of tax-cutting legislation into law. The first, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, included a variety of tax cuts that benefited nearly every single American household. ARRA contained the Making Work Pay tax credit that directly reduced a family’s income tax bill by up to $800, which, overall, reduced tax revenue by about $116 billion. It included expansions of the child, earned income, American Opportunity, and first-time homebuyer tax credits. ARRA patched up the alternative minimum tax, providing $70 billion in tax cuts, and cut a wide array of business taxes, together totaling another $60 billion
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First, President Obama’s tax cuts are much more targeted at the middle class. The Bush tax cuts were heavily skewed toward the wealthy with more than half of the entire benefit going only to the richest 20 percent. President Obama’s tax cuts, on the other hand, are distributed more evenly. Eighty-five percent of the benefits of the Making Work Pay tax credit, for example, went to the bottom 80 percent of households, and because the very wealthy don’t pay payroll taxes on all of their income, the payroll tax cut, too, benefits the middle class much more than the Bush tax cuts did.
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Poverty and income trends continue to paint a bleak picture for working families<...>
A quick comment on the effect of ARRAHow did the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA) affect the 2010 poverty and income numbers? Because ARRA was passed in February and was in the process of ramping up through the end of 2009, its full impact was felt in 2010. ARRA primarily affected these numbers by creating and saving jobs, the earnings from which otherwise would not have been there supporting family incomes. The Congressional Budget Office
estimates that the Recovery Act created or saved around one million full-time equivalent jobs in 2009, and 3.4 million jobs in 2010. Without these jobs, the decline in income and increase in poverty would have been much more dramatic. In other words, the new Census Bureau report is ugly, but without ARRA, it would have been much uglier. This underscores the growing impact of the end of ARRA—in the current quarter, ARRA is supporting only 2.3 million full-time equivalent jobs, and the number of jobs supported drops to half a million by the fourth quarter of 2012. This means that the loss of the boost from government action is—and without additional intervention will continue to be—a substantial drag on jobs and family income.
What about the direct income supports in ARRA? Of three major income supports in the stimulus—unemployment insurance, nutritional assistance (food stamps), and tax cuts—only unemployment insurance is counted in the income numbers just released; the income numbers include cash income received from programs such as unemployment insurance, but exclude noncash benefits like food stamps, and are measured before payments of taxes, so they do not reflect reductions in taxes. While unemployment insurance benefits replace a maximum of half of a worker’s prior earnings, these benefits went to workers who were laid off and who had low odds of quickly finding another job (in 2010, there were 5.3 unemployed workers per job opening on average). In other words, these unemployment benefits went to families that otherwise would likely have suffered even steeper income declines, and in some cases dropped below the poverty line.
Census data show that 3.2 million people were kept out of poverty in 2010 by unemployment insurance benefits alone.
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One year after the Affordable Care Act’s Patient’s Bill of Rights took effect, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) released a report summarizing some of the achievements of the health reform law. In the eighteen months since the president signed the Affordable Care Act into law, health reform has had a tangible effect in the lives of millions of Americans. The report discusses how the law is helping to give hardworking families the security they deserve and the reforms in the Affordable Care Act that have helped hold down insurance premiums, hold insurance companies more accountable and strengthen Medicare.
“The Affordable Care Act has made the health care system better for millions of Americans,” said HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius. “As a mother, a wife and a daughter, I know how important health coverage is for America’s families. This law is helping to give hard working families the security they deserve and stop insurance company abuses, hold down insurance premiums and strengthen Medicare.”
Recent reports, including the U.S. Census and the National Health Information Survey, have indicated that approximately one million additional young Americans now have insurance coverage due to the Affordable Care Act according to experts. The Patient’s Bill of Rights made it illegal for insurance companies to deny coverage to a child with a pre-existing condition or place a lifetime limit on the care they will provide. Through Affordable Care Act initiatives, 19 million seniors with Medicare have received new free preventive benefits, while efforts to cut fraud and abuse have extended the Medicare Trust Fund by 8 years, strengthening the Medicare program.
To read more about the many accomplishments of the law visit:
http://www.healthcare.gov/law/resources/reports/patients-bill-of-rights09232011a.pdfTo read a blog commemorating today by Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs Richard Sorian visit: www.healthcare.gov/blog
And he
saved the auto industry
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