Health Care and the Jobs Bill

Floor Speech

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Mr. DORGAN. Let me thank the Senator from California, Mrs. Boxer, and certainly Senator Reid and others. This vote was very important. The question for the Senate and the Congress is when 25, 26 million people wake up in this country and go looking for a job and can't find it--the numbers I know are 16 to 17 million people, but the real number of people who are unemployed in America is much higher than that. There are many who have given up hope. At a time when that many Americans are looking for work and can't find it, they need some hope. This Senate has a choice of doing nothing or doing something. There are too many in this Senate who have always been satisfied to do nothing. Tonight, finally, in a piece of legislation that will put people to work, we know, for example, that the private sector hires people, small and medium-size businesses. But we also know that when you spend money for highways, highway contractors are going to put people on payrolls immediately, because those programs and those projects are already engineered, already designed, ready to go. The money doesn't exist for them. When the money is made available, people will be hired immediately.

The same is true with respect to the wage tax credits in this piece of legislation. I held a hearing in the policy committee. We had three small to medium-size businesses there, all of which are profitable, all wonderful businesses, all ready to expand. But none of them could because none of them could find capital or they had no access to capital from their banks. Money was not available. These are successful businesses, profitable businesses, businesses wanting to and ready to expand, wanting to hire more people and can't do it.

The fact is, this legislation is another step in the direction of saying to small to medium-size businesses, when you are ready to begin hiring again, here is an additional incentive to hire that next worker. Slowly but surely we have to find a way to give people confidence, give the American people confidence that this economy is improving, that there will be a job, there will be opportunity and hope in the future.

We don't so much spend our days with people who are out of work. Most people serving in the Senate have a pretty wonderful opportunity. They put on a suit in the morning. We are the kind of people, we shower in the morning, put on a suit, are dressed up all day, come here. Our jobs are not being shipped overseas. In most cases, people in this Chamber have not been so much subject to the deep recession. But a lot of people have. Five-and-a-half million people who used to work in manufacturing making things have lost their jobs in recent years. The question for most of those people who are looking for some hope from their leaders is: Will somebody do something, or is the government going to be content to do nothing?

The action this evening by which these four pieces of legislation, which include some incentives for small and medium-size businesses, some bonding authority that will increase economic activity, the extension of the highway program that will put people back to work, expensing for small businesses--these are all things that are going to actually put people on payrolls. It is not a case where we will hire somebody as a government worker. It is a case of incentivizing highway contractors to hire people to help build roads and bridges and repair roads and bridges. It is a case of incentivizing small to medium-size businesses to say: If you need that extra little incentive to hire that next person, here it is.

Finally, and even more important than the incentive, is the signal this sends, the signal that maybe at least, at long last, we will begin to see some progress, some cooperation, circumstances in which Republicans and Democrats vote together in sufficient numbers that things can get passed and get done. With as deep a recession as we are in, the deepest since the Great Depression, there is an urgency. It ought to be treated as an urgent situation. This vote this evening may well put us on the road to understanding how urgent it is and how important it is that we take action rather than delay.

I thank the leader and so many others. Senator Durbin and I worked on a jobs package. These four provisions are in that package. There are other pieces we can implement in the future that will also be substantially important in getting people back to work, putting America back to work. I know the Senator from Ohio will speak next. I know he hopes that perhaps we will not just put people back to work but perhaps will make products that say ``made in America'' once again. Wouldn't that be a wonderful thing.

One additional point. I spoke earlier describing the metaphor of filling the bathtub. We are trying to get the faucet going with incentives to put people to work. At the same time you have to plug the drain a little bit. We have a drain of jobs going out of this country. The President, in the State of the Union, said: Let's get rid of that unbelievable tax break that we provide people for moving jobs overseas. I have been in the Senate working on that for a long time. It is unbelievable that we say to somebody: Close up your factory, fire your workers, move the jobs overseas, and you get a big fat tax break. We need to plug the drain, in addition to opening the faucet to try to get additional jobs and work on that in addition to the progress we have made this evening that will give some hope to the American people who want to go to work and need a good job.

I yield the floor.

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