Paul Wellstone Mental Health and Addiction Equity Act of 2008

Floor Speech

PAUL WELLSTONE MENTAL HEALTH AND ADDICTION EQUITY ACT OF 2008 -- (Senate - October 01, 2008)

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. CASEY. Madam President, thank you very much.

I rise today to talk for a few moments about the emergency economic stabilization bill.

First of all, I commend the work of a number of people here, but in particular Chairman Dodd, who did not want this assignment, had a tough assignment to work with people in both parties in both Houses to get this done. We have a lot more work to do after this, but I commend him for his work and for his leadership under very difficult circumstances.

There are a lot of ways to describe the challenge we face in America today economically and many ways to describe what we have to get done, what we are going to vote on tonight. I think if you could boil it down to one word or a couple of words, it would be--one word would be ``credit,'' or lack of credit. I think that is the basic problem. The freezing or seizing up of credit markets is not some far-off economic concept. That means small businesses in Pennsylvania and across the country cannot have access to credit to meet payroll and to hire people and to grow the economy. Probably half of our economy is small business, if not more. It means that families, when they go to finance an education, higher education, or when they go to purchase an automobile or something for their home, they cannot get access to credit.

We live on credit, and thank God we have it. But that system we rely upon, that families rely upon, is put at risk now because of what has happened lately. We can spend a lot of time figuring out why this happened, and we should after the debate is over. But right now, we have to act.

One headline does not tell the whole story, but it gave me a sense of what was going on. This is from USA Today on Monday, September 29. The headline reads: ``Tight credit costs small-business owners.'' In one headline, I think it encapsulated the challenge this problem is for our economy.

I think I am seeing it not just in headlines and anecdotes about what is happening to people who own small businesses across the country; we are all seeing it, as well, in the unemployment rate, in the job loss across America, which I would argue, as bad as it is now--and a lot of families have been living in this recession. I don't care what the economists say, when you are paying higher prices for gasoline and food and education and health care and everything in the life of a family goes up, you are in a recession.

I think in the last couple of weeks we have seen a terrible downturn in the job market. In Pennsylvania, for example, between July and August of this year--and this does not even include September, where the numbers will be a lot worse--just in 1 month, we lost 31,000 jobs in Pennsylvania. This is not just in Philadelphia, with a little more than 21,000 jobs lost, or in Pittsburgh, with 7,700 jobs lost; I am talking about smaller communities as well. In Johnstown, PA, a small labor market on this list, they lost 500 jobs in 1 month. In Altoona, PA--again, right next door to Johnstown, a small market--500 jobs lost in 1 month. Again, none of this includes the month of September. So we are seeing it everywhere in our State. If small businesses cannot grow and cannot have access to credit, they are not going to create the jobs we need.

One more statistic, and then I will wrap up. The Pennsylvania foreclosure rate in August 2007 versus August 2008 went up 60 percent. So even in a State that has been relatively--relatively--free of some of the trauma that Nevada and California and Florida and some other States have been hit with, even in Pennsylvania that foreclosure rate is going up at a rate much higher than the national average.

So what is this bill about? We have heard a lot about the description of it. I do not believe it is a bailout. We can debate what that means. I do not believe it is. I think it is a bill to stabilize our economy and our businesses and our families.

But there are a lot of taxpayer protections built into this legislation that were not there when we started: taxpayer warrants, as Senator Jack Reed talked about today; reimbursements, so at the end of the road 5 years from now, if taxpayers have not gotten what they deserve, these companies that might benefit will have to reimburse; very tough oversight, several levels of oversight.

We do not have time to go into all of them, but there is a special inspector general to crack down on what is happening when this program is implemented. There are limits on CEO and executive pay. It is the first time in American history that we have limited or put some restrictions on that pay. There are foreclosure prevention strategies, an expansion of the HOPE for Homeowners.

This is good legislation which we are making even stronger.

Finally, what we have to do after this is over, as important as this legislation is, is we have to get to work on regulation. We have to not just implement the right policies to regulate in a way we did not regulate before in America, but also, once those regulations are in place, we need to have people in Washington who are willing to crack heads--figuratively, of course--on those who abuse the public trust, those who abuse the rules and get people into mortgages, for example, they cannot pay for.

Finally, we have to make sure, in the months ahead and the years ahead, we invest in the long-term economy, invest in health care and education, the skills of our workers, to build a strong economy not just for this year and next year but for the next generation.

But in the end, this legislation we are voting on tonight is about credit. We are either going to do something about it and allow people to have access to credit or not. I think we have to act, and we have to act promptly.

Madam President, I yield the floor.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source