The Economy

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Mrs. DAHLKEMPER. Well, thank you. I thank the gentleman from New York, a fellow freshman who has been a good friend of mine since I came to this House.

I also want to thank Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz for bringing us all together tonight. It is a great opportunity to talk about the progress we have made and about the progress that we are continuing to make. We know we are in a recession, that we are digging out of a very, very deep recession, but the signs are positive.

You know, as is Mr. Tonko, I am very much from a manufacturing-based economy, and I look at those manufacturing numbers always with great interest to see exactly where we are going from my district. What I find, actually, to be very encouraging is that our American manufacturing base has grown not just in the last month, not just in the last 3 months, not just in the last 5 months, but for 10 straight months the manufacturing base has grown in this country, and that pretty well correlates with the passing of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. We have created more than 125,000 manufacturing jobs over the last 5 months.

Now, I know people back home talk to me about how we can move our country forward. They say we've got to get back to making things, and I completely agree with that. For so many years, our economy has become an economy of paper, and we have been more concerned about what has gone on with Wall Street than what has gone on in the factories throughout our great Nation. As I say, particularly for those of us in the Northeast, we've seen many manufacturing jobs go. So what I find very encouraging is that we are getting back to making things in this country.

With that, we have seen a couple of things. One is consumer confidence, which is another great indicator. It rose in June to the highest level in more than 2 years. That is from the University of Michigan, a consumer confidence survey. That's not from us here in the House. That comes from an outside source, which was just on the 11th of this month, just a few days ago. Consumer confidence is rising for the third straight month and to its highest level in more than 2 years. This was way before Mr. Tonko and I were in Congress, so that is very, very encouraging news, along with retail sales rising for the seventh straight increase and the 12th gain in 13 months. So there are a lot of very encouraging signs.

Now, I know this is still a problem for those who are out of jobs, and obviously we are still very, very concerned about that, but we have some signs that this economy is recovering. It really has had to do with what we have done here in the House, with so many of the good policies that we have passed here which have helped move this economy forward.

Here we will show you retail sales, which are on the rebound. When people start buying again, they have confidence, confidence that we are recovering. So here is what happened in the red during the Bush administration:

As you can see, we were going along pretty well until the recession began, which was going into 2008. Then, of course, it takes a very big dip right before I and Mr. Tonko took office. That was in November-December of 2008. Then you can see what happened after we passed the Recovery Act back here in March of 2009, and the numbers continued to steadily go up. Here we are in April of 2010, and we are getting almost back up to where we were, well, about 4 years ago, actually. So great news in terms of the retail sales on the rebound. Great news on consumer confidence going up. Great news on the manufacturing.

Of course, we want even better news. We want to continue to work on this economy and to help businesses create jobs. We are providing, as Mr. Tonko said, so many of the, I think, road maps that need to be there to create those new jobs. Whether we're talking clean energy, whether we're talking broadband, whether we're

talking health care, you know, we need to move into this new century. We're doing that, and we did many of those investments through the American and Recovery Act, and I always like to talk about the recovery and reinvestment side. The reinvestment is what we don't talk enough about, and I know Mr. Tonko loves to talk about that, too. We are talking about where we are today, and so these are just some of the numbers that, I think, need to be brought out, and the American people are feeling that confidence level going up.

I now yield back to the gentlelady from Florida.

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Mrs. DAHLKEMPER. You talked about other people weighing in with some of these surveys, and I just wanted to mention a few things that have been in the news just in the last week.

We have Melanie Holmes, the vice president of Manpower, Incorporated, who knows a lot about whether people are working or not. A very interesting thing about this result is that the positive trend is very broad-based. That was out of CNNMoney, again, just a few days ago.

Mark Zandi, the chief economist for Moody's, just a few days ago, said that nearly two-thirds of metro areas are flashing signs of growth. He said a tracking tool that is forecasting firms is showing this upturn, and it is the best showing since mid-2008.

Then we have from CNNMoney.com the title of ``Bosses More Bullish on Hiring.'' For the third straight quarter, more U.S. employers said that they will add jobs instead of cut them, according to a survey released Tuesday. The survey found that 18 percent of employers intend to increase staff, up from 16 percent the previous quarter.

These are people who are not associated with us here in the House of Representatives. These are independent groups out there, media outlets, who are seeing what we're seeing in these numbers here, and they're telling the American people the true story of what is going on in the economy.

I yield back.

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