to come into Social Security, which has always been 100 percent dependent, as it should be, on payroll taxes. For the first time, we are breaking that. Around here you do it once and it is going to continue.
Barbara Kennelly, the President of the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare, says:
Cutting these contributions to Social Security signals the beginning of the end.
So we should be very, very, very mindful of that. We should not support this payroll tax. It is one of the more dangerous provisions in this agreement.
But let me get back now, if I might, to what Bruce Bartlett—a former top adviser for Presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush—recently wrote:
If allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire is the biggest tax increase in history—one that Republicans claim would decimate a still fragile economy—then surely the expiration of a payroll tax holiday would also constitute a massive tax increase on the working people of America. Republicans would prefer to destroy Social Security's finances or permanently fund it with general revenues than allow a once-suspended payroll tax to be reimposed. Arch Social Security hater Peter Ferrara once told me that funding it with general revenues was part of his plan to destroy it by converting Social Security into a welfare program rather than an earned benefit.
Once again, that is a quote from Bruce Bartlett, a former adviser to President Reagan and the first President Bush. So what he is saying is—and this is maybe one of the sleeping issues in this agreement between the President and the Republican leadership— we may be taking a huge step forward in destroying the most important program in this country—which is Social Security—by diverting now $120 billion, and in the future hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars from this program so that, in fact, it will not be there for our kids and our grandchildren.
Mr. President, the fourth point I want to make in opposition to this agreement—and one that I have made before and read a little bit about—is that while some of the business taxes in this agreement may work to create jobs, some of them won't. The more important point is that economists on both ends of the political spectrum believe the better way to spur the economy and to create the millions and millions of jobs we must create is to rebuild our crumbling infrastructure.
Just a few minutes ago I read excerpts from a very good book by a friend of mine, Arianna Huffington, entitled "Third World America." The purpose of her book was to give us a warning that if we as a nation do not get our act together in a variety of ways, including our physical infrastructure, we are headed down the pike to be a Third World nation.
According to the American Society of Civil Engineers, we as a nation need to spend $2.2 trillion in the next 5 years alone in order to take care of our infrastructure needs.
Unfortunately, this agreement, signed by the President and the Republicans, doesn't put one penny into infrastructure. So if we are serious about creating jobs, if we are serious about making sure our economy can be competitive in the global economy, we have to be watching what other countries are doing, and they are investing far more than we are.
The stimulus package, by the way, will help us very much in Vermont in this area. Right now, if you were to drive around the State of Vermont— and I think in many other places in this country—and you took out your cell phone, you would find it very hard to make calls in a number of areas of the State. A few months ago, I was literally a mile and a half away from our State capital in Montpelier, near Northfield, VT. I could not make a telephone call with my cell phone. That is true in many parts of Vermont and in many areas of America. We are lagging behind many other countries in terms of the accessibility of cell phone service and broadband—and broadband.
So I am happy to say that in Vermont we received a very generous grant through the stimulus package that will help us, and other States did the same. But those are areas where we have to invest. You have to invest in broadband and make sure cell phone service is available in rural America— all over America. I talked a moment ago about our train services. There are train services today which are worse than they were 30 or 40 years ago. It takes longer to get from destination A to destination B. China is investing huge sums of money building high-speed rail at a rate that we could not even dream about.
So while in this agreement we do have money for business tax cuts, I do not think that is the best way to invest taxpayer money if we are serious about creating the jobs that we need. Corporate America already is sitting on close to $2 trillion cash on hand. I don't know that more tax breaks are going to help them very much. I think that it is a lot smarter—and I think most economists agree with me—to be investing in our infrastructure, both to create jobs now and to improve our competitiveness in years to come.
Further, Mr. President, I want to say a word on this—I mentioned this earlier today: President Obama talks about this being a compromise agreement; you can't get everything you want. I certainly understand that. But one of the aspects of the compromise he points to is an extension of unemployment benefits for 13 months. Well, let me be very clear. I think at a time when 2 million of our fellow Americans are about to lose their unemployment, at a time when unemployment is extraordinarily high—long-term unemployment is, I think, higher than at any point on record, with people looking for work month after month after month and not finding it—it would be morally unacceptable if this country did not extend unemployment benefits for those workers for 13 months. Yet the President sees this as a great sign of compromise.
I would argue the contrary. I would suggest to you that for the past 40 years, under both Democratic and Republican administrations and under Democratic and Republican leadership in the Senate or in the House, whenever the unemployment rate has been above 7.2 percent, unemployment insurance has always been extended. In other words, this has been a bipartisan policy for 40 years. I don't want to see us seeing and accepting as a really great give on the part of Republicans— something that they are giving us as part of a compromise—when it has been bipartisan policy for 40 years under Democratic and Republican leadership. So I don't accept this as a great gift. I think the American people understand you don't turn your backs on unemployed workers—people who have been unemployed for long periods of time. You don't allow those people to lose their homes. You don't force these people out into the streets. You don't take away what shreds of dignity they have remaining. That is not what you do. That has always been Republican philosophy as well as Democratic philosophy. This is not a great gift. So I do not accept this is a compromise.
Let me be very clear. As I said earlier, I do believe there are positive parts of this agreement that must be maintained as we move forward toward a better agreement. Let me cite some of them that make a lot of sense to me and that I believe we have to retain and build on.
The obvious one, in addition to extending unemployment benefits, is we have to extend middle-class tax cuts for 98 percent of Americans. As I have been documenting over and over again today, we are looking at a situation where the middle class in this country is collapsing. Under President Bush, the median family income went down by $2,200. People are losing their health care. It would be asinine, it would be unacceptable if the middle class did not continue to receive the tax breaks that were developed in 2001 and 2003. That, to a large degree, is what this fight is about. We have to extend those tax breaks to the middle class but not tax breaks to the millionaires and billionaires.
Further, there are some other good provisions in this agreement—the earned-income tax credit for working Americans and the child and college tax credits—and they are very important. They will keep millions of our fellow Americans from slipping out of the middle class and into poverty, and they will allow millions of our fellow citizens to send their kids to college. I just talked a moment ago about the fact that we have over 100,000 families in this country where kids graduate high school wanting to go to college but can't afford to do so. This proposal will help them do that, and that is right.
