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Mr. SALAZAR. Madam President, I wish to thank my colleague from Michigan for her great leadership on the Finance and Budget Committees and raising these issues that are so important to America. I think particularly when you come from a State such as her State of Michigan, where they have an unemployment rate that is knocking on the door of 8 percent, she knows how hard it is for families in Michigan and the families across America as they see our economy spiraling downward and going into a ditch, which essentially makes what we are trying to do in the Senate today more important than at any other time.
Madam President, I wish to start first by asking unanimous consent that I be permitted to speak on the Finance Committee stimulus package for such time as I may consume.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
Mr. SALAZAR. Madam President, I wish to first comment on the Finance Committee and the way that committee works.
First, we are on the floor of the Senate with a Finance Committee package in large part because we have two great Senators who have been a part of this Chamber, a part of this institution for a very long time and who make it their priority to get results. They transcend partisan politics for the public purpose for which they were elected.
It is in that vein that time and time again the packages we have brought forth from the Finance Committee have had both Democratic and Republican support as we have tried to move forward to confront the challenges that face our country today. This economic stimulus package that is before us today is no exception. It was voted out of the Finance Committee, a committee I am very proud to be a part of, with a bipartisan vote, in a bipartisan spirit, and with the sense that we needed to give a flu shot to this economy before it gets sicker; and with the sense that we need to help this economy go into a positive direction as opposed to getting further and further stuck in the ditch of disrepair, where it has been headed for the last several months.
So this is a very important package that comes before the Senate today, and we must remember its genesis in the Finance Committee is in fact a bipartisan genesis to respond to what the President has asked the Congress to do, not only in his State of the Union speech but even before that, when he said we need to have a stimulus package to help get our economy back on track. Well, we have done our level best to try to put together that package in the Finance Committee. I am proud to support it, and I hope that when we get to a vote on the Finance Committee package tomorrow, we are able to get Republicans and Democrats to stand together in a resounding positive vote for moving forward with this Finance Committee package. I hope the vote is not just a vote that gets us to 60 but hopefully gets us to 70 or 75.
Now, why is it important that we move forward and jump-start our economy? Well, it is important for the American families whose lives are very much affected by the actions we take on the floor of the Senate. It is important to embrace what the President and the House of Representatives have done, which is to say we ought to put money back into the pockets of the American consumer so they can spend that money which then helps create jobs in America and helps to stabilize our economy. But what the White House and the House of Representatives did in their negotiations with Secretary Paulson and others is something that can be improved on, and certainly the bipartisan work of the great team on the Finance Committee, which includes the staff of that committee, has brought forth what is a significantly improved package over what came out of the House of Representatives.
The first of those improvements has to do with dealing with those Americans who were left out: 20 million elders, 20 million seniors, 20 million people who have given their lives to give us the opportunities we have in America today. I am speaking about those who came before us and who now depend on Social Security. The package out of the House excluded 20 million seniors because it says you have to have earned income in order to qualify for this tax check that is going to go out from the Government to the people of America. Why should we exclude these 20 million seniors who are receiving Social Security? Because Social Security is not earned income. Therefore, they are excluded under the provisions that came out of the House bill.
So if we are to honor what I believe is one of the fundamental values of America--that is to honor our elders, to respect our seniors--then it is important for us to make sure we change the package to include the 20 million seniors of America.
The one thing we do know, from what all the economists have told us, is that if you put this money into the pockets of 20 million elder Americans, those 20 million elder Americans are going to spend that money, which means it is going to help stimulate our economy. So that is one improvement.
Are there other improvements that could be made to this economic stimulus package? Well, the fact is there are other improvements that can be made. A second improvement we made in this package that we deliberated and worked out in the Finance Committee has to do with our disabled veterans. We have 250,000 disabled veterans in America today; 250,000 disabled veterans. Many of these veterans are veterans from World War II, some of them from the Korean conflict, some of them from the Korean war, and some of them are part of the 1.5 million veterans who have served in Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom.
Why should these 250,000 veterans not receive the benefits we are providing all the rest of America today? It makes no sense, in my view, if we are trying to stimulate the economy. We put, probably for a family of four, $1,600 checks into their pockets. They are going to spend this money to help stimulate the economy. It is the right thing to do for us to uphold the American values and to support our veterans here in America. It is absolutely the right thing to do.
It is also the right thing to do in terms of one of the objectives which we have, which is to help stimulate our economy. Third, when I ask the question, can we improve this bill--yes, we can improve it by adding 20 million seniors. We can improve it by adding the 250,000 disabled veterans. But we can also deal with the reality of unemployment.
Maybe some people around here have not dealt with families that have been unemployed. But when you lose your job, you lose everything that creates a quality of life for you. Because you cannot take care of your family, you cannot take care of making your mortgage payment, you cannot take care of buying medicine for your children. And, yes, we have now States in America that are reaching an unemployment rate of 8 percent, and the economists are saying there are a number of States that are going to be up into 6 to 7 percent before too long. So extending unemployment benefits is also an important improvement in this package.
But it is not that we can take care only of seniors and disabled veterans and extend unemployment benefits; there are other things, I believe, we can do to help make sure that we improve upon the stimulus package for America we are considering here today, and that is to help the business community of America, make sure that business community remains in a way where it can continue to create jobs for the people of this country.
The incentive we have created in this legislation with the expensing provisions relating to small business, with bonus depreciation for businesses that expend money on equipment, will help keep America strong. Without those businesses creating jobs for America, we are going to continue to spiral downward. It is important that we do that.
I want to point out one provision relating to our efforts to try to support the business community of America here today, and it has to do with housing. The other day when we heard from the many economists who have come before the Finance Committee, one thing was very clear. One of my colleagues, Senator Baucus, talked about how the housing crisis itself was a canary in the coal mine. It is a signal to us that our economy is in trouble. The housing sector of our economy demonstrates that perhaps in a way that very few other sectors of the economy do. So it is important that we do something for the housing issues facing our country today.
The chart that is here by me demonstrates what is happening with housing across America. You look at what Moody's said would happen in terms of what they forecast to be, where we will end up as we move forward into these difficult economic times with respect to the housing market.
They predict that housing prices will decline by 15 percent before we see bottom. How many people in America own a house, and how many people in America have most of their value tied up in that house? When you see these times of declines in housing values, you know the people of America, the people who are watching us debate here on the Senate floor, know there is pain in the economy here in America today. When you lose 15 percent of what is your most valuable asset, you know there is a major issue with the economy. So it is important that we address the housing issues of America, and we are doing that partially in this legislation by including revenue bonds. There are other things we are going that have to do with the housing crisis we face here in America.
It is my hope one of the things we are able to do is to come back and address the housing issues, along with energy, along with the farm bill, in a chapter 2 of our economic agenda in the Senate. But it is also important, as you look at this chart, to look at what is happening with housing starts in America. We are in the worst shape today in housing starts in America than we have ever been. In fact, those who are associated with the home building industry will tell you we are in worse shape today than we have ever been since the Great Depression. There is no end in sight when this housing crisis is going to end with respect to the decline in housing starts that we see.
The economists out of Moody's project that housing starts are down 60 percent, at the bottom of this trough, with no end in sight. Who knows how far that will go down?
What we have done, spearheaded by Senator Conrad and with the help of Senator Stabenow and Senator Smith, is included in this legislation that will address the operating loss carryback provisions that apply to the housing industry. That economic injection will help the housing industry continue to stay afloat to weather the very troubled times ahead. Now, some people will say: Why are you bailing out the housing industry? Well, we are not bailing out the housing industry, we are trying to keep one of the sectors that is pivotal to a successful economy alive here in the United States of America.
Across my State, I know how many people work in the housing industry, from the roofers to the plumbers to those who put up the drywall. We know how many of them work. There are 300,000 people in America who are working in the housing industry today. So if the housing industry continues to go downward, if it continues to spiral downward, we are going to see the bankrupting of one of the most important industries today.
This stimulus package does include some legislation that will allow them to take their carryback losses in a manner that makes sense for them economically so that they will not be forced into the halls of the bankruptcy court.
For a lot of reasons, I believe this stimulus package which is before us is a solid package. It is very significantly improved from what we were seeing come over from the House of Representatives. I would hope that the President of the United States, his Cabinet, Secretary Paulson, others, Secretary Gutierrez, join us in helping move this Senate Finance package through to the finish line.
The final point I would make is that though we hope we will get this package through, we know that our work here on the economic issues of America is not yet done. A second and short-term phase, which I believe we should undertake here in the next month or so, is we need to deal more comprehensively with the housing issues that face our country. We need to deal with the 2007 farm bill and get that through conference and get that done to ensure the food and fuel security of America.
We need to return to that Finance Committee-produced package on energy that would have fueled the clean energy future of America for the 21st century. We need to go to that as soon as we get the stimulus package through. I am hopeful that we will be able to move in that direction.
I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.
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