Agriculture Reform, Food, and Jobs Act of 2012--Motion to Proceed--Resumed

Floor Speech

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Mr. KYL. Mr. President, I wish to comment on something the President recently said that is very much in the news.

Last Friday, the President of the United States said, ``The private sector is doing just fine.''

This is not taken out of context. He was talking about economically. His office leader explained what he was really talking about is the comparison between the public sector and the private sector, and I take him at his word there.

The President said:

Where we're seeing weaknesses in our economy have to do with state and local government--oftentimes cuts initiated by governors or mayors who are not getting the kind of help that they have in the past from the federal government and who don't have the same kind of flexibility as the federal government in dealing with fewer revenues coming in.

I think that is generally true. But here are the two key points I would make in response: First, everyone--not just government employees--is suffering. They are struggling in the Obama economy.

Yes, the number of government jobs has decreased during the last 40 months since President Obama took office, but overall employment in government has increased on the whole in recent years, even with the reductions that have occurred in the last couple of years.

For example, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, total government employees added up to 21,847,000--rounded off--in January 2006. That is just a little over 6 years ago--21,847,000. By comparison, last month the total amount of government employees added up to 21,969,000. So there are a few more government employees today--State, Federal, and local--than there were just 6 years ago. I would just ask, how on Earth did we get by in this country with only 21,847,000 government workers in 2006? I think we were doing just fine.

The reality is, when a private firm faces financial difficulty, usually the first area the firm looks to in terms of saving money is its workforce. It is too bad, but frequently firms have to lay off workers because they simply can't afford to continue to pay that many workers.

I will just give the experience of a friend of mine in Arizona who said: This recession was probably the best thing that happened to us because it forced us to look at our workforce, how we did business, and whether we could make savings. He said: Today, we are making more money than we ever have, even with a lower workforce, because we found that we could make do and make the improvements that made us more efficient.

We are asking that to be done in government. Government doesn't have a right to continue to grow and grow. Government should be as efficient as the private sector, including with respect to the number of people it hires to do the work that has to be done. After all, the private sector has to take care of paying both the employees in the private sector and the employees in the government sector. Who pays government employees? All of our constituents, the people in the private sector.

So we in the government have an obligation to run the governments--Federal, State, and local--as efficiently and leanly as we possibly can. If we find we can run the government with just a few more employees today than we had, for example, 6 years ago, then all the better for our economy and all the better for the taxpayers who have to pay their salaries.

So there isn't some right of the Federal Government to continue to grow its workforce at a rate higher than the private sector. Rather, we should be trying to run the government on as few a number of employees as necessary to do the work the American people want us to do. But here is the larger point: As the Wall Street Journal points out, the reason the government workforce has shrunk since January 2009 is not due to smaller budgets or dwindling aid, as the President suggested. As the Wall Street Journal notes, revenues to State and local governments have increased during the last 2 years, according to census data. The main problem is rising health care and pension costs for government workers, and we have seen the experience in a State such as Wisconsin in having to deal with that to make some reductions, which caused a lot of political turmoil in the State. But at the end, the voters of the State said: We agree. We need to cut government cost as it relates to the health care and pension commitments we have made to our government employees.

While government has experienced some job losses, it is important to remember that benefits enjoyed by government workers are far superior to those enjoyed by those employed in the private sector. For example, according to an article in the National Review magazine, on an hourly basis private sector employees' benefits cost their companies $2.15 an hour. State and local government workers cost taxpayers $4.72 an hour--219 percent more.

For retirement benefit costs, the private sector figure works out to $1.02 per hour. The State and local workers sum, $3.37 an hour--a 330-percent premium.

This is where the extra costs are for government workers. You can't blame State and local governments for trying to provide more efficiency for their operations by conforming their practices for health care and pension benefits more to those in the private sector.

Why do government employees deserve more? I guess that is the question. As is a matter of fairness--and especially when compared to people who are paying their salaries--I don't think anyone can argue that government employees should have twice as much or three times as much of a benefit as somebody in the private sector.

The second point I would make is this: At 4.2 percent, according to the latest data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the unemployment rate among government workers is also far below that of the private sector. We know the average in the country is 8.2 percent, and that is only the people who are still looking for work. If we took all the people who are out of work, it would be about 11.1 or 11.2 percent. But among government workers, the unemployment rate is 4.2 percent.

Compare that with unemployment in some other sectors. In agriculture, it is 9.5 percent; 8.1 percent in the wholesale and retail trade; 9.7 percent in leisure and hospitality, to name just a few industries.

In each of these I named--I think each of them would be thrilled to have unemployment at 4.2 percent. When the President says the real problem is with government employment, the private sector is doing just fine, the facts simply belie that. The President was wrong; he was incorrect.

Finally, let me address his theory of how an economy grows. Unemployment, as I said, is 8.2 percent nationwide. Labor force participation is at historic lows--the number of people actually working or looking for work. GDP growth in the first quarter of 2012 was a very anemic 1.9 percent. This is not enough for this country to grow and prosper and the President wants to borrow or raise taxes from that segment of our society so taxpayers can finance more government workers? That does not make sense.

I think not only is the President wrong on the facts about the private sector doing just fine, he has it wrong as to what the solution would be. The solution to help government workers is to have the private sector do better so it can afford to help--to hire more government workers and to pay them better benefits. Government stimulus spending and aid to States has not grown the economy so far and it is obviously not going to do so in the future.

Rather than divide the country into public versus private sector workers, Federal versus State and local workers, rich versus poor, men versus women, as the President is wont to do, I hope we work hard to represent all Americans. No one benefits in the long run from an enormous government with an appetite to grow more and more, crushing economic growth and crowding out the private sector, a government that drives up costs for job creators and forces companies to lay off private sector workers. None of us benefits from that. Yet that is what we are seeing playing out right now. The total number of unemployed and underemployed is over 23 million people in the United States. Think of that. That is the number of people who are looking for work who have stopped looking for work or who do not have the kind of work they could be doing. Economic growth last quarter, as I said, was only 1.9 percent; only 69,000 new jobs added. We need more than twice that many jobs added each month in order to keep pace with the new workers coming into the economy, so we are losing ground in terms of jobs created. I don't think the President's solution of more spending on government employees is the answer. I think that is a recipe of another 40 months of 8 percent-plus unemployment. At that rate we are not going to get out of the economic difficulties we are in right now. Let's do things that support the private sector, things that help the private sector. The healthier the economy is, the more growth we have, the more we are able to do for the public sector as well. That is the ultimate answer.

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