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Mr. PORTMAN. I thank my colleague from Tennessee. I happen to have the answer to his question. Yesterday--he is correct--we did propose a jobs plan, which is a series of commonsense proposals to get our economy back on track and create jobs across our country.
You will recall that a few years ago there was a stimulus effort in the Congress--the President's $800 billion stimulus plan--that was passed. The idea was to get the economy back on track. There were estimates that it would have a big impact on job growth and, in fact, reduce our unemployment numbers significantly. That didn't happen.
One of the reasons that didn't happen is because it relied too much on government providing the resources for jobs. Government doesn't create jobs, but government can create the climate for job growth. Our view is that we need to take a different approach. That approach is to stimulate private sector job growth and create that pro-growth environment.
The seven proposals we announced yesterday as part of our jobs plan include being sure that we do indeed deal with the deficit and debt because that is a negative impact today on our economy. In fact, there are economic studies out there showing that our GDP is much smaller than it would otherwise be but for the deficit and debt. Also, we need to reform the Tax Code to spur economic growth. Economists across the spectrum agree that we can stimulate economic growth by having a Tax Code that makes more sense for job creation.
Regulation is a major issue. We will hear from our colleagues who want to make sure we have regulatory relief for small businesses which are not able to create jobs because of the increased regulations coming from Washington.
We need a workforce that is more competitive, and that requires the Federal Government to do a better job on workforce development. Also, there is the need to increase and expand exports. The President has talked about that. We are eager to get trade agreements in Congress. We can create hundreds of thousands of new jobs immediately through expanding markets.
We also talked yesterday about energy. This is important. There are things we can do right now to get America less dependent upon foreign oil and use our own resources in this country more effectively. Then in terms of the health care circumstances--we will talk about this in a moment--every person I have talked to in Ohio, and I have been on over 200 factory visits in the last couple years--tells me the cost of health care is going up not down, which is making it harder to create jobs. We will talk about the need to reduce health care costs.
This is a commonsense, seven-point plan to get the economy moving and create jobs. It is incredibly important to get the unemployment numbers down and to be sure American families have opportunities. It is also very important, though, in terms of dealing with the debt and deficit because, although we need to restrain spending--and Congress is beginning to take small steps in that regard--we also need to grow the economy.
When we have 1.8 percent economic growth, which we had in the last quarter, which is anemic, weak, and not something we should be satisfied with, it is difficult to create that economic growth to help deal with this huge overhang of deficits and debts.
As the Senator from Tennessee said, we have other colleagues with us today, and Senator John Hoeven from North Dakota will talk about these issues, as will Senator Barrasso from Wyoming. Senator Cornyn from Texas has just joined us.
I ask Senator Hoeven, a former Governor of North Dakota--where there is about 3.6 percent unemployment and is a State that is producing domestic energy to help meet our needs and is a big State for exports--if he will talk about his ideas on job growth and how it fits into this job plan.
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Mr. PORTMAN. Madam President, I thank my colleague from North Dakota. He makes great points about the need for us to use our resources at home on energy and for us to expand exports because that immediately creates jobs in this country. He has done it. As a Governor, he rolled up his sleeves and got directly involved in economic development. He knows what it takes. The fact that he has been a champion of this plan and helped put it together gives me confidence that this is going to work.
We need to work on a bipartisan basis. We are reaching out to our colleagues on the other side of the aisle and the administration. So much of this is common sense. These are things we should do now.
We are also joined by our colleague from Wyoming. He is Wyoming's doctor. He is also a leader in the Senate and has taken the lead on a number of issues related to jobs, two of which are part of our jobs plan. One is, of course, the regulatory front, where he has taken the time to really dig into how these regulations affect business growth. He may have comments on that issue today.
I would like to hear Dr. Barrasso on that point but also on the health care front where, as a doctor, he looked into what the impact of health care reform will be on jobs. This is something that perhaps does not get talked about enough. Unless we figure out a way to get health care costs under control, it will be harder for us to create opportunities in this country because the costs embedded in hiring a new employee under health care alone are so high that many companies are simply not hiring. I would love to hear his thoughts.
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Mr. PORTMAN. Madam President, I thank Dr. Barrasso. I appreciate the amount of time he has put into this regulatory issue and the relief small businesses need on the regulatory front. It is obvious he is out talking to businesses, and it is directly related to jobs because we cannot get the jobs back unless we reduce the cost of doing business that comes from these regulations.
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Mr. PORTMAN. Madam President, I thank my colleague from Texas. He is absolutely right. When we look at the budget deficit and the debt and the impact it is having on our economy today, it is clear we need constraints. Forty-nine States have a balanced budget requirement. When I am back home talking with people in our cities and counties, in their struggles with balancing their own budgets, they ask me: How can Washington continue to spend so much money it does not have? Forty cents of every dollar Washington spends today is borrowed money. Clearly that restraint is needed.
It is important to get the economy back on track. Often we talk about the record budget deficit and the $14 trillion debt in terms of its impact on future generations. As the father of three, I am very concerned about that, as we all should be, because we are mortgaging their future, the excessive spending today that they are going to have to pay back.
It is not just what is going to happen in the future. Our deficits and debts have gotten so big that there is an impact on the economy. There was a study done recently by a couple of respected economists--Rogoff and Reinhart--which says, in looking around the world, where a country's debt is up to 90 percent of its total economy, you have about a 1-percent decline in the GDP or the growth in the economy. Our growth was only 1.8 percent last quarter. That means it should have been at least 2.8 percent but for our debt and deficit because now our gross debt is 100 percent of our economy. So we are over that 90-percent threshold, and we are impacting our economy today.
When we think about it, with all the government borrowing out there, it is crowding out private borrowing. There are fewer jobs being created in America because the government is playing a bigger and bigger role, crowding out the ability of small businesses to get a loan.
I also join a lot of other folks in this Chamber on both sides of the aisle in my deep concern about the possibility of a debt crisis if we do not deal with these historic deficits and debts. That could send our economy into a tailspin with sky-high interest rates, with inflation that is already rearing its ugly head again in this country. We need to address this issue because it is the right thing to do for future generations--it is really a moral issue--but also because it does impact what is going on today in our economy and our ability to get this economy back on track and create jobs. It is so important to American families and, as I said earlier, so important for us dealing with the fiscal problems because we have to both restrain spending and grow the economy, increase economic activity, which will increase revenues.
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Mr. PORTMAN. First of all, I thank my colleague from Tennessee for helping to promote this idea. Again, we are looking to reach out to Democrats in this Chamber, in the House, and working with the administration, to actually get this done. We need to get the American economy back on track.
I just heard the Senator talk about trade, and we talked about that earlier. But as was said earlier, we need to increase exports because exports equal jobs. If we look at these three pending trade agreements, which the administration has yet to send to Congress--and we can't move unless they do that--they would create, alone, between 250,000 and 380,000 jobs, depending on what numbers you look at. Think about that, hundreds of thousands of jobs are ready to be created right now by knocking down barriers to our workers, our farmers, and our service providers just in these three instances alone.
We also need to provide the President with the authority to knock down more barriers by giving him trade promotion authority. So I call on the administration to send us those agreements--free up those agreements--and allow us here in America to be able to create more jobs by expanding our exports, by leveling this playing field between these three countries--Panama, Korea, and Colombia--and then let us get busy on having the United States even more engaged in international trade, expanding exports and, therefore, creating jobs.
Let me review quickly these seven core areas and then turn it back to my colleague from Tennessee.
We do need to focus on the fiscal situation, as we have talked about, to be able to help the economy. Our Tax Code needs to be reformed to create economic growth. We can do that. We know there is a way to do it without raising taxes and by reforming the code and making it more progrowth; the regulations we talked about that are stifling so many small businesses in this country; the competitive workforce, retraining is critical, and we can do a much better job taking the existing Federal resources and directing them toward retraining for jobs that are actually there; expanding exports, we just talked about; of course, powering America's economy by using more of our own domestic resources--renewable but also traditional uses of energy; and, finally, getting health care costs down, as Senator Barrasso talked about.
If we do these things, we will create more hope and opportunity at a time when it is so desperately needed. We should be able to do it because they are commonsense ideas.
I thank my colleagues.