Conditions in the Economy

Floor Speech

Conditions in the Economy -- (House of Representatives - February 11, 2009)

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Mr. COFFMAN. Thank you, Congressman Akin. You're absolutely right. This legislation will hurt this country. It will hurt us in the short run. It will hurt us in the long run. Primarily because it does a couple of things. First of all what it doesn't do is provide the kind of stimulus that the advocates for this legislation are talking about. It is not front end, so it is not timely; it is not targeted in the sense that all of its elements are not stimulative in terms of being jobs-producing; and it is not temporary in that it creates a lot of recurring obligations. And so that as the economy is moving up out of a recession, what you then have is the government is still running deficits to pay for these programs and that that borrowing, competing with private sector borrowing, driving up interest rates, driving up inflation and hurting the long-term abilities of this economy to recover from that. So I think that it's absolutely the wrong course for this country. A lot of actions have already occurred. The Congress has already enacted $700 billion in the form of TARP to get the credit markets moving. Some of that well spent, some of that not.

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Mr. COFFMAN. Fortunately States such as Colorado have a balanced budget requirement so they're not allowed to run an ocean of red ink like the Federal Government, so there is certainly an advantage there in terms of fiscal responsibility and accountability that certainly doesn't exist with this legislation.

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Mr. COFFMAN. What you had to do as a small business owner is to restructure your business to make it more efficient. There's no effort whatsoever to restructure government to make it more efficient. And States are asking for their own bailout. It relieves them of that responsibility.

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Mr. COFFMAN. Congressman Akin, we are ignoring small business, which is the backbone of this economy, in this equation. And the central issue there is I think we've got to look at the grassroots of our financial system and we see there that credit markets aren't moving. And I think if we examine some of the regulatory framework around that as well as the TARP elements that are not working at that level, that's the central issue to get the economy moving, not pouring in billions and billions of dollars in wasteful spending.

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