Unanimous Consent Requests--H.R. 9051 and H.R. 6395
Floor Speech
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Mr. TOOMEY. Our economy is in nothing like the situation we faced during a moment in March when this body came together and voted unanimously, I believe, for the most extraordinary aid package-- financial stimulus bill, however you care to characterize it--in the history of the world by far. Remember where we were. We had closed down the economy. To a very large degree, the American economy had stopped functioning because State governments around the country decided they had to close it down. We can discuss and we can argue about whether that was a good decision or not, but given the limited knowledge we had about the nature of the COVID-19 threat, it was deemed to be the right thing to do.
So we were on the verge of having no economy. That has never happened before in our history.
So what did we do? We decided this calls for extraordinary measures, and we would try to use Federal dollars as a substitute for the economy--just replace lost income on a massive, unprecedented scale-- and we did. We approved almost $3 trillion in that legislation.
At the time, we included $1,200 per person. You could make an argument that that was an extremely inefficient use of that $1,200 per person, but at the time, given the circumstances, I understood why we didn't have many good options, and that was something we decided to do.
So where are we now? We are in a very different place. Our economy is not in a free fall. Our economy is in a recovery mode. We are not back to where we want to end up. We are not back to where we were before March, but we have taken big steps in that direction.
The economy grew at 33 percent last quarter--33 percent. That is a tremendous recovery that is underway. More than half of all the people who lost their jobs earlier this year have regained their jobs. So we are not finished yet, but that is a huge step along the way.
And now we are being told, after passing another extraordinary bill-- this one almost $1 trillion and including $600 per person--that that is not enough; we need to do $2,000 per person, despite the fact that we know for sure, we know for a fact, that the large majority of those checks are going to go to people who had no lost income.
How does that make any sense at all? We know for sure that the majority of these people had no lost income. They didn't lose their jobs, and yet we are going to send them not $600, not the $1,200, but $2,000.
So think about this. A married couple, who both are working and have 2 kids, maybe they work for the Federal Government, like 2 million-odd people do. Maybe they work for a large company, the vast majority of which did not have large numbers of layoffs. So this two-child, two- income couple that makes six figures had no interruption, no diminishment of their income whatsoever. They are going to get $8,000 of money we don't have that is going to be either borrowed or printed. That is what it is all going to come down to.
There are people who are still suffering from the economic fallout of this terrible COVID crisis. There is no question about it. We know there are people who are concentrated in a handful of industries, for the most part--not exclusively--but people who have worked in the restaurant industry, people who work for hotels, travel, entertainment. So many of those people are still out of work and their prospects of getting their old jobs back are not good in the short run. I sure hope they will be good in the medium-term run, if not sooner.
And our bill addressed that. It addressed that problem. How did we do that? With a new round of PPP loans, which are really grants to small businesses, if they will keep their workforce intact; expansion of unemployment insurance benefits, so that people who have historically been ineligible remain eligible so they can continue to collect unemployment benefits; an increase in the amount of unemployment benefits, a $300-a-week overlay of Federal money on top of whatever their State program is; $600 per person, regardless of whether they lost income.
All of that was passed just a few days ago, and now we are told we need to come back immediately, right now, and make sure that we are sending $2,000 checks to people who had no lost income.
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