Press Releases

So, as Joe Friday might have said in a different age, just the facts, because that's what we intend to focus on this morning. On March 11th, 2020, Dr. Fauci gave his warning as to what was coming. Within three months, 20 million Americans had lost their jobs. That's the reality today.

Not only have all those jobs been returned. But just as importantly, there are still 11 million jobs that go unanswered every day in America. Just the facts. I know I helped write this legislation, and I didn't write it with just Speaker Pelosi. I wrote it with Secretary Minuchin in the room over eight days. Much of this legislation was written by the previous administration, so just the facts.

849 billion of unemployment insurance. Of that number, it's estimated that 7.1% was fraudulently spent. We do not on the Democratic side defend fraud. We want the Justice Department, we want our witnesses today, to pursue aggressively any of that criminal element that did what they did, but let us not conflate the need for unemployment insurance with what happened during the course of the pandemic.

12 million jobs have been created under President Biden 517,000 last month, and the unemployment rate in America is now 3.4%. So the paycheck protection program worked. The unemployment insurance program worked. The relief that we gave to hospitals where people were in the hallways on ventilators, it worked.

So when I asked Secretary Paulson, a Republican, who would, couldn't have been any more cooperative in helping us to devise the program, or when we asked Secretary Munchin, or when we asked Secretary Rubin, Secretary Yellen and Secretary Lew as to how to proceed, they gave us the advice to get cash into the hands of the people at the bottom of the economic scale, who really need it.

So, what did we do? We devised an initiative to make sure that the community bankers were in the middle of it because they had good credit histories with the people that needed the money. How about the idea of what we were able to do with the credit unions and CDFIs? What we did overwhelmingly worked.

And to pick on people, of the 20 million who lost their jobs, and to suggest that they stayed home during the pandemic. The number of women who have not come back to the workforce because they couldn't find childcare, those are the issues that the committee should be focused on this morning. Nobody condones fraud. We want those to be pursued who participated in a criminality that relates to fraud, but the idea that there's a massive number of people staying home because they can collect unemployment insurance, tell that to the members of the AFL CIO in the trades union.

It had to stop construction jobs during the course, but tell that to the hospital workers who came to work exhausted every single day to make sure that we got past the pandemic. If the reporters who cover the early stages of the pandemic, when they pointed out the issues, they said early on, oh, China's doing a great job.

I don't think anybody who looked back at the last six months, and say China did a better job than the United States. Didn't we use the example of what a great job New Zealand was doing compared to the United States? The Prime Minister just stepped down last week. The approval rating, 39%. We restored the jobs that were necessary in America.

It should be a banner of success that we're celebrating this morning, Republican and Democrat. And just another key phrase here to point out, much of the unemployment insurance was passed out during the Trump administration. That's a fact. The idea once again, that there's this group that's out there in America that doesn't want to work because they can secure unemployment benefits. In Florida, $250, a week?

In unemployment insurance? That's nonsense. And the other part of this, I think that's important. Unemployment insurance is like a trampoline. You hit it on the downside, and you bounce back up into the mainstream of the American economy. And that's precisely what's happened. So, from our witnesses today, we hope that they will outline precisely what it is they are doing to secure charges of criminality, but understand in terms of proportionality, what really happened here.

Overwhelmingly, the American economy rebounded because of what we did, and much of it, by the way, came in this Committee and most of it unanimously that was passed through the doors of this, this room. So, I'm proud of what we did, and I hope the focus today is going to be on the rule that unemployment insurance made in making sure that people could keep the lights on, turn the heat on, and make it to the grocery store to buy the sustenance of what they needed every single day.

Just as I started, we will conclude with just the facts this morning. Thank you.

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