Repeating the Lesson of the Great Depression

Floor Speech

Mr. McCLINTOCK. Mr. Speaker, when the stimulus bill became law, unemployment stood at 8.2 percent. Today, a year and a half and hundreds of billions of dollars later, unemployment is 9.5 percent.

This spending binge hasn't made things better. It has made things demonstrably worse because, before government can put money into the economy, it first takes that money out of the economy. We see the jobs created when government puts the money back, but we don't see the jobs that are lost, because government first took that money out of the economy.

When we borrow trillions of dollars, we crowd out the very same capital pool that would otherwise have been available for businesses to create jobs; so those jobs don't get created, and the ranks of the unemployed grow.

These are the same policies that turned the recession of 1929 into the Depression of the 1930s. Do we really want to repeat that lesson?

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